Lessons Learned from POCUS Instruction in Undergraduate Medicine During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Point of care Ultrasound (POCUS) has been adopted into clinical practice across many fields of medicine. Undergraduate medical education programs have recognized the need to incorporate POCUS training into their curricula, traditionally done in small groups with in-person sessions. This method is resource intensive and requires sufficient equipment and expertise. These requirements are often cited as barriers for implementation. During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, POCUS education was required to adapt to physical distancing regulations, giving rise to novel teaching methods for POCUS. This article outlines the implementation of a POCUS teaching session before and during the pandemic. It describes how these innovations can scale POCUS teaching and overcome barriers moving forward. A flipped classroom model was implemented for all learners. Learners were given an introductory POCUS module before the scheduled in-person or virtual teaching session. Sixty-nine learners participated in conventional in-person teaching, while twenty-two learners participated in virtual teaching following the pandemic-related restrictions. Learners completed a written test before and following the teaching. In-person learners were assessed using an objective structured assessment of ultrasound skills (OSAUS) pre- and post-learning sessions. A follow-up survey was conducted three years after the teaching sessions were completed. Both in-person and virtual groups demonstrated statistically significant improvement in knowledge scores (p <0.0001). Both groups had similar post-test learning scores (74.2 ± 13.6% vs. 71.8 ± 14.5 %, respectively). On follow-up questionnaires, respondents indicate that they found our online and in-person modes of teaching helpful during their residency. POCUS education continues to face a variety of barriers, including limitations in infrastructure and expertise. This study describes an adapted POCUS teaching model that is scalable, uses minimal infrastructure and retains the interactivity of conventional small-group POCUS teaching. This program can serve as a blueprint for other institutions offering POCUS teaching, especially when conventional teaching methods are limited.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".