Clinical placements in General Practice: concepts and considerations of implementing remote virtual placements in the COVID world

ABSTRACT

Medical students are considered as ‘essential workers’ within the National Health Service (NHS) and the delivery of clinical experience is essential to their learning and progression into the workforce. The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the delivery of clinical placements in primary care; GPs are currently delivering the majority of consultations using telephone or video methods and difficulties in attaining placement experience are being encountered by medical students. Virtual remote consultations are an appropriate adjunct to conventional face-to-face patient encounters and could facilitate students to attain core learning outcomes. This article describes some of the approaches that enable remote (home) virtual patient encounters in Primary Care for medical students. These are categorised as methods that a) enable remote access into GP clinical systems, b) enable remote access into individual patient consultations and c) enable an observational-only experience. Key considerations are highlighted to enable safe and effective implementation of remote virtual consultations, along with the advantages and disadvantages of each method. These include patient consent, confidentiality, data sharing and protection, professionalism, student agreements and data gathering templates. It is hoped that sharing of these methods of virtual consulting will support the ongoing delivery of Primary Care education across medical schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical education
• primary care placement
• virtual
• remote consultation
• COVID-19

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the RCPG/SAPC Heads of Teaching group for discussions about virtual remote consultations that helped inform the article, in particular, Professor Joe Rosenthal, University College London, for sharing the example of student agreement (Figure 2) which was amended for this article.

Finally, we would like to acknowledge Dr Kiki Steel, Market Cross Surgery in Lincolnshire, for sharing the virtual consultations template (figure 4).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).