Resident Clinical Experience During the Pandemic: What Has It Cost Us and What Have We Gained?

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 and pediatrics residency training: before 2020, it was difficult to imagine a public health crisis that could so immediately bring critical aspects of health care and society to a grinding halt. Yet slightly more than a year into the pandemic, we are still seeing significant disruptions in health care and society due to the pandemic. In this issue of Hospital Pediatrics, Geanacopoulos et al 1 evaluated the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on pediatric residents in the emergency department, ICU step-down unit, and hospitalist settings in one training program. The authors determined that residents provided care for fewer patients on their emergency department and hospitalist services, worked fewer shifts, and had decreased exposure to common respiratory and gastrointestinal diagnoses. Although residency programs often rely heavily on experiential learning while also integrating didactic learning, during the pandemic many programs had to shift their focus within education by creating alternate experiences, such as the virtual curriculum this program created.Programs across all specialties are now reevaluating how they assess clinical competency and how they will achieve educational goals for trainees required of a residency program. [2][3][4][5][6][7] As pediatric residency leaders, we must balance the need to graduate residents on time with fulfilling our mission to provide a comprehensive training experience. The pandemic has created more questions around clinical competency than answers. We thus ask: How has the pandemic affected pediatric residents' clinical competency? In what areas can programs augment residency education to assure graduates are ready to practice without supervision? If we decide residents working fewer shifts and caring for fewer patients are still competent doctors, how does this impact the future of medical education? If we decide residents working fewer shifts and caring for fewer patients are less competent doctors, how should we address this problem for current residents? Our pediatrics community will need to evaluate competency ratings for trainees during the pandemic and determine if additional educational supports may be indicated.