The current consensus among the medical and scientific communities is that Covid is here to stay. As we are advised to adapt ways to live with it like we do with seasonal diseases, some practices may persist from mask-wearing to retaining remote work and schooling.
It’s the latter that concerns my sister, a medical student and junior clerk. She worries about “a generation of doctors lacking clinical experience,” citing that in a field like medicine, only so much can be learned remotely. In this series, Y2Z checks in with three medical interns—one each from Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao to get a glimpse on the effects of halted face-to-face and experiential learning amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Jabie Antonio, Metro Manila
How would you compare your clinical experiences before and during the pandemic?
Clinical experience before the lockdown was all about getting dirty on the ground level and learning how to survive in the medical field, whether it’s the survival of you, your seniors, your health-care team, or your patient. At that time, all you had to do was get by day-to-day and absorb as much as you could. You just knew that this was the system. You wanted to change things, like make working conditions more humane but for the most part, there just aren’t enough doctors for all patients in the Philippines.
Come March 2020, hospitals were unsure whether sending their trainees to the frontlines would be a good idea or not. Thus, most of us were deployed to non-Covid wards. Of course, the reduced exposure was much appreciated but you could see the strain on the resident doctors.
There was an acute understanding that the workload that used to be passed on to trainees was being made up for by the seniors. Fortunately for us, the residents understood our situation. Even with the extra workload and the fatigue, they were not remiss in teaching us on a case-to-case basis.
A major shift in education has been a move to online learning. How do you think ‘clin-ex’ can be done given the realities of an evolving virus?
A growing branch nowadays is telemedicine. The facilities for such are still lacking here in the Philippines compared with institutions abroad but we make do with what we have. And in that sense, there’s still a large avenue for students to be able to learn despite the changes.
Given the situation, how do you see the future of the medical establishment, from those in med school to those practicing in hospitals?
Honestly the future looks bleak. Whoever said that health was not political must have been f***ing high. If the current leadership does not understand the concept of the building blocks of health and invest in it, then we will continue to run into problems with each health crisis.
But the capacity to change the situation still exists. At the ground level, hospitals need to start considering their workforce as their primary resource and treat them as such because skilled workers are one of the most difficult resources to replace, especially considering the well-being of patients.