The Impact of COVID-19 on Plastic Surgery Residency Training

Abstract

Nowadays didactic and surgical activities for residents in the surgery field are less and less due to an increasing burden of documentation and ''non-educational work.'' Considering the current lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has never been so important to find different ways to allow residents to improve their knowledge. We asked all plastic and esthetic surgery residents in our country to fill out a questionnaire to investigate changes in their didactical activity and analyze problems about their professional growth in the last few months. From the results of such questionnaires, we found that most of the residents feel the decrease in surgical activities during this time is a detrimental factor for their training and that even if all the schools have changed their didactical activities no school has introduced the use of virtual simulators to compensate for the decrease in surgical practice. Actually, the majority of residents use webinars to keep updated, stating that such technologies are useful but not sufficient to analyze plastic surgery topics in depth during COVID-19 lockdown. Virtual interactive tools are well known in different clinical and surgical specialties, and they are considered as a valid Keywords Questionnaire Á Training program Á Residents Á Education Á COVID-19 Dear Sir, Nowadays didactive and surgical activities for residents in the surgical field are less and less due to the increasing burden of documentation and ''to spend time at non-educational work'' that detracts from clinical experience [1]. Most of all, in this difficult period of COVID-19 infection,

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