Laysan Mukharyamova, Maksim Kuznetsov, Andrei Izmailov, Elena Koshpaeva, Samuel Stumborg, Karim Qayumi

Kazan State Medical University Survey after the Use of CyberPatient during COVID-19

Creative Education Vol.11 No.10, October 27, 2020

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic created challenges for medical education, particularly for the acquisition of clinical skills. At Kazan State Medical University (KSMU) we used an online simulation platform called CyberPatientTM (CP) to provide a clinical environment in a virtual space with a variety of patients for students to practice their clinical skills. In this study we surveyed 59 students who used CP in the 2020 spring semester. This survey’s objectives were to gather the students’ opinion on usability, value, efficacy and impact of the CP platform. Survey results revealed that CP is used significantly (P<0.0001) more when it is an integral part of the curriculum, it was not difficult to operate the system (96.6%); the students were satisfied with the number, quality and variety of the cases in CP platform (93.3%); over 90% of students identified CP valuable; a significant number of students (p<0.001) believed that CP was effective and 89.9% of students believed that CP had a measurably high impact on their knowledge and experience.

This study concludes that the use of virtual clinical environments such as CP is perceived by students to be valuable and effective in learning clinical skills particularly during this pandemic and in the post-pandemic period when the access of students to clinicalenvironments remains limited.