Transforming postgraduate medical education during the COVID-19 pandemic: creating a trainee-led virtual teaching platform

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the provision of postgraduate medical education across the country. There has been a widespread need to upskill and empower the medical workforce in order to tackle the evolving clinical situation. At Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, traditional face-to-face group teaching was suspended due to the need for social distancing, but the appetite for learning was high. We recognised the need for alternative teaching methods and identified two key educational areas that required attention: topics related to COVID-19 and its management, and education for doctors being redeployed to other specialties. We developed an innovative method of education delivery to regularly provide high-quality, relevant material to hundreds of healthcare professionals at both hospital sites. We believe that our methods could help other organisations to maintain teaching as the pandemic progresses.