Virtual Simulation Experiences in an Emergency Medicine Clerkship: Novel Approaches to Simulation-Mediated Education in the Setting of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has restricted medical students from attending on-campus education, such as didactic lectures, workshops, and simulations. This poses a particular problem for Emergency Medicine (EM) Clerkship at Thomas Jefferson University (Jefferson), as simulation remains the featured cornerstone of rotation. Over the course of the clerkship, students participate in high-fidelity simulations that objectively link to systems-based practice and problem-based learning and improvement. In this document, we describe a novel clinical simulation experience for senior medical students in an EM clerkship that fulfills clinical course learning objectives, while still providing students the opportunity to experience simulation-based learning. We also describe the tools we used to convert the rest of our curriculum to an online platform.

Goal: To provide students in the Emergency Medicine clerkship with virtual and simulation-based opportunities that support task-switching, information processing, decisional autonomy, and procedural knowledge.