Pedagogy in a pandemic – COVID‐19 and virtual continuing medical education (vCME) in obstetrics and gynecology

The COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a global health crisis that caused significant loss of life and massive economic and social disruption. Many countries have enforced physical distancing and reduced social movement to minimise community spread. The greatly increased service demands and the initiation of team segregation to ensure continuity of care has resulted in both Specialty Trainee [ST] postgraduate training and wider academic congregation being cancelled.1 For Asia-Pacific nations, such as Singapore, this is reminiscent of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome [SARS] outbreak in 2003. At that time, specialty training was completely halted for six months, with resources prioritized for the outbreak.2-4 When our first case of COVID-19 was detected in late January 2020, we looked to lessons learned5,6 and moved our ST educational delivery from face to face didactic learning to a virtual domain. Our Obstetrics and Gynecology (OG) STs work on the frontline and need to be equipped with the knowledge to care for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 OG cases. With predictions that this pandemic may stretch into 2021, we share the promises, practices and pitfalls of our experience thus far.