INVESTIGATION OF PROSPECTIVE MEDICAL SECRETARIES' PERSPECTIVES OF ONLINE EDUCATION: THE EXAMPLE OF FEBRUARY 6, 2023 EARTHQUAKE

Aim: Two major earthquakes struck Turkey on February 6, 2023. After this natural disaster, tens of thousands of people lost their lives and hundreds of thousands were injured. A state of emergency was declared for three months in 11 provinces namely Kahramanmaraş, Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır, Adana, Adıyaman, Osmaniye, Hatay, Kilis, Malatya and Elazığ where the disaster took place. Five days after the earthquake, the Council of Higher Education (CoHE) announced that the spring semester of the 2022-2023 academic year would be completed through distance education. Thus, in the present study, we aimed to investigate the perspectives of medical secretariat students, one of the important branches of the health services sector, about the distance education decision made by the CoHE due to the earthquake. Methods: In line with this purpose, an e-survey was administered to the first and second year students studying in the Medical Documentation and Secretarial Program of a public university in Anatolia between February 13 and 17, 2023 (N: 285). In the analysis of the data, both the descriptive statistics and the Chi-square analysis were used. The data were analyzed in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) V.26. Results: Of the students, about three quarters were female students, a little more than half were second year students, and the vast majority stayed in state dormitories. The number of the students who lived in the earthquake zone and lost their relatives in the earthquake and whose houses were damaged was less than was that of the other students. Approximately three quarters of the Medical Documentation and Secretarial Program students did not favor online education, in other words, they wanted to have all the courses face to face. Conclusion: In short, necessary suggestions were made to heal traumas throughout the country and not to compromise on the quality of education.