Impact of COVID 19 Pandemic on Anesthesia Resident's Training Program in Cairo University Hospitals. A Cross-sectional Study.

Overview

In December 2019, a cluster of pneumonia cases, caused by a newly identified βcoronavirus, occurred in Wuhan, China.1 The World Health Organization (WHO) officially named the disease as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses named the virus as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).2 On 11 March 2020, the WHO declared the epidemic of COVID-19 as a pandemic.3 The pandemic crisis prioritises critical care for those coronavirus (COVID-19) patients who have been most profoundly affected, and hospitals, staffing, and working practices have been radically adjusted to accommodate this.4,5 The healthcare industry, in particular, has been overwhelmed by the effect of COVID-19 on healthcare resources. This has been underscored by providers concerned about emotional strain and physical exhaustion, access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical equipment, workplace exposure to COVID-19 and disease transmission to family members.6 Physicians are essential for any health-care system and at the frontline defense against the COVID-19 pandemic. They play a crucial role in diagnosis, treatment, prevention of disease spread, and public education during this pandemic. Moreover, they are frequently exposed to infected individuals with COVID-19, making them at higher risk of infection than others.7 Anesthesia is one such specialty whose residents are uniquely at risk of exposure to infection in the operating room or ICU. Residents reported that their learning schedule is distorted in our hospital regarding skills because of increase ICU rotations, cancelled elective surgeries, missing one or two of the major rotations. Also, lecturers were stopped and replaced by E-learning after a long period. Examination schedule was changed and so the research schedule. Infection of the trainees (or a member of a family) had a great emotional and physical impact on them. COVID-19 will not go away any time soon, and therefore the new balance between service provision and training needs to be agreed in a sensitive way to avoid further frustration amongst trainees. Adaptations to these circumstances have delivered new forms of teaching and supervision. We design this cross-sectional study and implement a survey that included a 58-question to accomplish the specific aims of the present study through comparisons of two groups of residents and to provide plans for the training programme to be less affected by pandemics.