Editor's Note: This story has been edited to remove suggestions these students are already working as licensed physicians, along with some other minor edits.
Fourth-year medical student Sarah MacVicar was one week into her practicum working in the emergency room in the hospital in Cranbrook when COVID-19 grew into a global pandemic.
Only two months away from graduation from the Northern Medical Program at UNBC, MacVicar had it all mapped out. She’d finish her month-long stint at the hospital in Cranbrook and return to Prince George to prepare for her final licencing exam in early May.
The COVID-19 crisis scuttled that plan. MacVicar’s practicum was canceled and she and her classmates who had scattered around the country in hospitals and medical clinics were sent home.
“It’s sad that things had to get canceled early but the one week of it was excellent,” said the 30-year-old MacVicar, a native of Nova Scotia. “People were starting to be suspicious and worried about (COVID) and were in that early stage of wanting to come in and get tested. That was an interesting thing to see, that public education piece just starting, and also see the hospital’s emergency planning starting to kick in.”
The NMP and its four-year tiered enrollments of students wasn’t the only doctor training program affected by the pandemic. The spread of the virus halted practicums for UBC’s entire faculty of medicine, which involves close to 1,200 students combined at its campuses in Prince George, Kelowna, Vancouver, and Victoria.
MacVicar, who will begin a general surgery residency in July in Edmonton, was already involved in administrative planning within the UBC faculty and was part of a task force to figure out how help students make the transition to online learning. MacVicar and fourth-year student Gurkirat Kandola of Prince George took on the task of matching their NMP classmates with volunteer duties in the local community that would allow them to utilize their medical skills in activities to take the place of their electives so they could meet graduation requirements.
Several medical students have stepped forward to volunteer for Northern Health’s COVID-19 online clinic and information line and have been working at call centres in Prince George, Smithers and Terrace. Others have been tasked with a project to locate supplies of personal protection equipment for frontline health-care workers.
“The health line itself, if you have any questions about COVID, I think that’s a really great initiative by Northern Health because the (provincial) 811 line was quite backed up and waits are still quite long for that, so the local resource was started,” said Kandola.
“We had some students who were previously nurses or had experience with (medical office assistant) support and some of them returned and helped with that. We also started a PPE initiative and reached out to local clinics asking them if they’re able to donate any medical-grade equipment to their hospitals across Northern Health. It’s really been a team effort and the faculty up here and Northern Health has done a great job working together.”
Neelam Minhas, a D.P. Todd Secondary School grad, was just beginning a four-week stint assessing patients assigned by Dr. Khurum Saif when the UBC faculty canceled all student electives. She stepped in right away to help staff the COVID crisis line.
“That was a great opportunity to get a better sense of how to address patents’ concerns using technology,” said Minhas. “We were answering calls people had regarding their symptoms and deciding what would be the next steps in terms of management. We would identify if they met criteria to either self-isolate, be swabbed for COVID or is their symptoms constituted them as high risk.”
Minhas, 27, linked up with local plastic surgeon Dr. Christine Kurz to create the script for a video for the Takla First Nation to use on its Facebook page. They rounded up first responders, nurses and doctors to provide input on the videos, which stresses the need for kindness, social distancing and staying home to reduce the COVID-19 threat. Another video made by Minhas challenges other medical students in the province to produce similar video projects to highlight COVID-19 safety measures, with prizes available for the video that receives the most hits before the May 1st deadline.
“What’s really come to the forefront through this whole crisis the importance of public health and prevention strategies,” Minhas said. “Essentially, we’re trying to prevent the spread by staying home and limiting the amount of social interactions we’re having and creating that distance but also staying connected using technology.
“In terms of our curriculum, they started using Zoom to teach lectures and more technology to make it more interactive and that’s been really cool. It’s interesting to see how quickly we adapted to that structure sitting at home and watching the lecture on our screen and asking questions with Slido. Because of technological advances we’re able to do so much but still stay connected.”
Minhas will move to London, Ont., this summer for her physical medicine/rehabilitation residency.
Graduating NMP student Kirsty Bock set up a Zoom teaching network which connects first- and second-year students with third- and fourth students who teach sessions which cover clinical topics.
“I think that’s been one of the most successful initiatives in the Prince George program,” said MacVicar. “Just seeing that collaboration between the classes has been incredible.”
In addition to quarterbacking her classmates’ volunteer initiatives, Kandola has volunteered for the COVID-19 online clinic and has teamed up with several community organizations to translate some of Northern Health’s online information about the virus into Punjabi.
“Especially with something like the novel coronavirus, we haven’t had experience with this and there’s been a big push to increase public awareness and that can be difficult when there are language barriers,” said Kandola. “In some of the smaller centres in the north it can be harder to get access to those resources.
“I’m just trying to figure out the best way to be helpful and figure out the needs of the community, because we do have a few months here when we aren’t as busy.”
Kandola, a 28-year-old Prince George Secondary School graduate, is among seven fourth-year NMP students who grew up in Prince George and her elective cut short by COVID was in general surgery in Quesnel. Kandola will take on a residency this summer at BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver. With graduation ceremonies on hold, she’s disappointed she won’t be able to cap her NMP studies with one last formal get-together at the UNBC agora, as the graduating classes over the previous 12 years did, but that’s insignificant to her considering all that’s happening in the world.
“I’m just grateful that I’m healthy and I’m able to help out in the ways I have been and my family and friends are healthy and that’s the mindset I’ve tried to adopt,” said Kandola. “Residence comes with its own challenges, but this will be a unique experience going into residency at this time and I’m trying to prepare myself for that.”
In New York and some of worst-affected U.S. states, medical students were rushed through graduations months ahead of time to help medical centres join the fight against the pandemic. There was no early graduation of doctors in Canada and with classrooms now closed, medical school final tests will have to wait. The NMP licencing exams scheduled for May 3-4 in Prince George now won’t likely happen until the fall.
