Leading the way: Innovating medical education in adversity

Abstract

In conflict or disaster-affected regions, medical education faces unprecedented challenges.¹

A disruption to medical school teaching results in students being unable to see patients and attend normal teaching due to safety concerns or political restrictions, which threatens the ability of medical students to graduate on time and serve their local populations.

A call for support from the Dean of an international medical school in difficulty led to a search for an appropriate resource; however, we were unable to identify an accessible, comprehensive virtual undergraduate medical school resource to fill this educational inequality gap.

At a time when many international health care systems are facing crises, prioritising accessibility to medical education is essential to sustain the global health care workforce and meet patient demands.

Over a 6-week period, over 200 health care professionals and educators (‘contributors’) co-created an innovative medical educational platform to support learners-in-difficulty in their place of safety.

Training and support were provided in the areas of content creation, quality assurance and supervision. Leadership skills focussing on compassion and accountability were used to coordinate teams to work together and create the ‘Medical Schools in Difficulty’ (MSID) eLearning platform.

MSID website content is displayed through peer-reviewed video recordings, with each of the 200+ uploads aligning to every patient presentation on the United Kingdom's General Medical Council (GMC) Medical Licencing Assessment (MLA) content map—the gold standard for UK doctors.

MSID is free to access and has offline functionality. The inclusive platform has welcomed users from over 25 medical schools across 10 countries following widespread dissemination from contributors, platform users and educational institutes since its launch in November 2023.

There are no competing interests for any author.