Abstract
Upon the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries worldwide face a critical shortage of human resources in the health sector. Medical students are a potential task force with the capability to support the stretched health sector. This study aims to evaluate their training need for epidemic control in order to employ them effectively. A cross-sectional study was conducted using a web-based survey from December 2019 to February 2020. There were 5,786 observations collected using the snowball sampling technique. Logistic regression was applied to identify factors associated with training participation in epidemic prevention and disaster prevention. Multiple Poisson regression model was constructed to examine factors associated with the number of times they participated in sanitation training and disaster prevention activities in the previous 12 months. Sanitation and health education communication activities had the highest proportion of participants, with 76.5 and 38.4%, followed by examining and treating diseases in the community (13.4%). Those who participated in community activities had a higher number of times to participate in epidemic sanitation training and be involved in disaster prevention. This study informed the need for training programs to prepare medical students for COVID-19 epidemic responses. The training curriculum should include both theoretical approaches and contextual approaches to achieve efficient epidemic control.
Highlights
COVID-19 is the infectious disease caused by a new coronavirus that was first reported from Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019
Data were collected from December 2019 to February 2020 in Vietnam, which covered the period from the very first COVID-19 cluster that was reported in Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019 until the outbreak was declared a public health emergency of international concern by World Health Organization (WHO) on 30 January 2020 but before WHO declared the outbreak as an epidemic on 11 March 2020
The findings of our study indicated that the medical students who had participated in community activities were likely to participate in training classes on environmental sanitation for epidemic prevention and be involved in disaster prevention; only nearly half of them did participate in these activities
Summary
COVID-19 is the infectious disease caused by a new coronavirus that was first reported from Wuhan, China, on 31 December 2019. The UK government, for instance, had briefly considered the “herd immunity” approach but quickly had to admit that, with COVID19, the health impact, including the mortality rate, would be phenomenal [3, 4] Other countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam chose to apply strict measures at the early stages of the outbreak rate such as forced isolation, social distancing, and strict quarantine and contact tracing rules. Those strict measures help those countries to keep the numbers of COVID-19 cases low but require extra human resources, especially well-trained preventive medicine staff that could lead to a shortage in many countries during this epidemic period
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