In looking for creative ways to grow medical education within the various COVID-19 restrictions, a novel platform of computer-based emergency case simulations was born. The Duke-NUS Medical School’s Emergency Medicine Student Interest Group (SIG) proposed and helped organise these simulations with SingHealth Emergency Medicine Residents, and featured in the Education in Medicine Journal.

Article abstract:

Today, residents in all disciplines are expected to be involved in not just educating themselves but in the education of others and peers as well. They are involved in a wide spectrum of teaching and instruction techniques such as case presentations, lectures, practical hands-on teaching, bedside clinical tutorials, informal discussions and simulation-based training. Simulation-based teaching has been playing an increasingly important role in both residency training as well as medical school curricula. In particular, it appeals to adult learners as it very task-driven and task-oriented, it allows for constant active engagement during role-playing in simulated scenarios and enables repetitive practice until a certain level of mastery or competency is achieved. The SingHealth residents training in emergency medicine have been collaborating with and engaging medical students from the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, as the two entities for a common Academic Medical Center. They share many collaborative projects and activities, research as well as educational training programmes. However, with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, both face-to-face medical teaching as well as simulation-based teaching proved to be challenging. One alternative is to move these teaching collaborations and programmes onto the online platform. This study describes the experience of emergency medicine resident-educators who conducted emergency medicine computer-based simulations (CBS) in collaboration with a group of medical students from the Duke-NUS Emergency Medicine Student Interest Group during the COVID-19 pandemic.