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Background The COVID-19 pandemic has led to substantial changes in the delivery of healthcare and medical education. Little is known about how the pandemic has altered medical students' perceptions in regard to career choice. Methods The authors developed and implemented a multi-center survey that evaluated medical students' preferred career choice before and during the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the influence of pandemic-related factors on that choice. The survey was distributed to all levels of medical students (MS) at nine medical schools across the country from November 2020 to January 2021 and represented a convenience sample. Preferred career choice was assessed through the use of a Likert scale and additional factors affecting career choice were solicited. The degree of interest before and during the pandemic, as well as factors influencing the shift, were treated as ordinal variables and compared using chi-squared testing. Cohen's Kappa statistic was calculated to assess the degree of shifts of interest in Emergency Medicine among students. The study was deemed exempt by the Institutional Review Board at the host institution, Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, and all participating sites. Results A total of 1431 of 6710 (21.3%) eligible students completed the survey. The COVID pandemic was cited as a reason for a changed interest in specialty by 193 (13.5%) students. The most common reason for specialty change was the students' clinical experience, followed by a desire to be on the front lines, and personal/family health concerns. There was a significant association between career change and degree of interest among students interested in emergency medicine (EM) as their future specialty before the COVID pandemic as well as during the COVID pandemic. Living with an immunocompromised individual had a significant association with a reduced interest in EM. There was a significant association between EM rotation completion and how interested students were in EM as their future specialty before the COVID pandemic and during the COVID pandemic. Among EM-interested students whose specialty interest was changed by the COVID pandemic, 34 (41.5%) became less favorable to EM, 28 (34.2%) stayed the same, and 20 (24.4%) students became more favorable to EM. Conclusions The impact of COVID-19 on medical students' career choice is a complicated matter that involves both personal and professional factors. It appears that there is a trend towards less interest in the field of EM with multifactorial influences, some of which are related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) Approved Instructional Resources (AIR) Series was created in 2014 to address the Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM) movement's decentralized nature and lack of inherent peer review. The AIR series provides a topic-based, curated list of online educational content vetted by academic emergency medicine (EM) faculty that meets individualized interactive instruction criteria for EM trainees. Relevant FOAM resources were identified from the top 50 FOAM websites using the Social Media Index and then scored by EM faculty using a validated instrument to identify the highest quality posts related to a topic. This article reviews FOAM resources pertaining to EM procedures that were labeled as an "Approved Instructional Resource" or "Honorable Mention" using the AIR series methodology.
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The Council of Residency Directors in Emergency Medicine (CORD) Advising Students Committee in Emergency Medicine (ASC-EM) anticipates institutional and regional variability in both the spread and response to COVID-19. Travel restrictions and host institution rotation closures will impact the number of emergency medicine (EM) rotations EM-bound medical students can complete in an unprecedented manner. They may prevent students from completing any away rotations this academic cycle, challenging the students' ability to obtain EM Standardized Letters of Evaluation (SLOEs). EM's emphasis on residency group SLOEs over other letter types creates an undue burden on these vulnerable students and makes the application process intrinsically inequitable. This inequity warrants a reevaluation of the current application practice. This article outlines ASC-EM's proposed recommendations for all stakeholders, including EM program leadership, medical schools, and EM-bound medical students, to consider for the upcoming EM application cycle.