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Medical students and COVID-19: lessons learnt from the 2020 pandemic

At the start of 2020, a medical student’s largest problem was passing their next exam at medical school. To doctors, these students were people who needed to be taught but were of minimal help in the hospital. The COVID-19 pandemic changed this for both parties. There are some crucial lessons to be learned.

As COVID-19 started to overwhelm the National Health Service (NHS), final-year medical students saw exams cancelled, graduations accelerated and their career start date fast-forwarded. With this came student anxieties regarding their preparedness for the job and their fear of being ill-equipped. Starting as a doctor is a difficult transition under normal circumstances, but it is even tougher in a global pandemic. As these anxieties grew, some students wrote letters to publicise their concerns. One such letter was written relatively early on and published in the Lancet .1 It asked for greater guidance and transparency regarding indemnity, contracts, expected roles and responsibilities of students. As a result of this, a survey was conducted with Oxford University medical students to give students a voice and understand their involvement in the current pandemic. Many people experienced a significant degree of anxiety during the past 3 months and medical students are no exception. There are some key lessons to learn from the results of this survey to better equip this subset of the population in future, either for a second wave of COVID-19 or a different infectious pandemic altogether. It is inevitable that another pandemic will occur. The only questions are when, and if we will be better prepared for it next time.

The vast majority (80%) of medical student respondents were working across NHS Trust hospitals, in primary care and in the community, with a further 11% still waiting to be tasked.

In hospitals, students were placed in Accident …