Difficult Times: The Coronavirus Pandemic and Cardiology Residency – The Experience of the Rio Grande do Sul Cardiology Institute

Abstract

At the time, Dr. William Healstead realized that seriously ill patients treated by recently certified clinicians had higher mortality rates. In response to this, and in the hopes of increasing the quality and success rates of patient care, Healstead created a new type of training program, in which emerging clinicians would receive their final training in the hospital environment itself. This model, replicated globally, is currently known as medical residency. 1 In Brazil, the Orthopedic Department at Hospital of Clínicas, associated with the University of São Paulo (USP), pioneered the first Brazilian medical residency program in 1945. However, this training model was not officially adopted in the country until September 5, 1977, through decree No. 80281, which instituted residency training as a formal component of medical graduate training. 2-4 Since then, physicians worldwide have been able to train in specialized medical residency programs that not only deepen their theoretical understanding, but also provide a supervised environment for development of the practical skills required by their desired area of expertise. After being identified on December 1, 2019 in Wuhan, China, with the first cases reported on December 31, a novel infectious disease-coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19-a quickly emerged as a global concern. 5 The World Health Organization (WHO) subsequently declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, and the highly transmissible virus was named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). 5