Disaster medicine and pandemic response: A novel curriculum to improve understanding of complex care delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

BackgroundDespite a 2009 recommendation from the AMA that disaster medicine and public health response training should be implemented in medical schools, anywhere from 31% to 47% of medical education programs lack a formalized disaster medicine curriculum. A need for disaster medicine response training for University of Alabama medical students in an appropriately socially distanced format was identified during the COVID‐19 pandemic.MethodsOur emergency medicine faculty in collaboration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency Center for Disaster Preparedness (FEMA CDP) created and implemented a novel virtual disaster medicine and pandemic response course for third‐year medical students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). The course was administered via a teleconferencing platform (Zoom, Zoom Video Communications, Inc.) in spring 2020 to more than 130 medical students.ResultsUsing pre‐ and postcourse surveys, we assessed a change in student confidence levels for their ability to explain topics covered in the course and their understanding of a chosen disaster. The students reported an average increase of 2.183 on a 5‐point scale, with a score of 5 representing “completely confident” and a score of 1 representing “not at all confident.” This course established the feasibility of a virtual instructor–led training (VILT) format for disaster medicine education and provided a template for the delivery of over 300 courses to more than 4,000 first responders and medical professionals through the FEMA CDP.ConclusionsThrough collaboration with the FEMA CDP, our UAB faculty were able to successfully deliver a novel virtual disaster‐preparedness and response course. The course resulted in subjective improvement of students’ content understanding while also establishing the feasibility and effectiveness of a VILT format that could be readily applied to future courses in undergraduate medical education and beyond.