The impact of COVID-19 on medical student surgical education: Implementing extreme pandemic response measures in a widely distributed surgical clerkship experience

The third year Patient Care Phase clinical rotations include 12 weeks of Internal Medicine and 6 weeks each of Family Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Surgery. In addition to the required patient care clerkship, we also have a variable number of students in 4th year surgical clerkships, also spread throughout the WWAMI region. Logistically, the issue of clinical evaluation and how to administer the required NBME test were among the first concerns. Since the 3rd year students had completed 4 of 6 weeks of the rotation, the UW SOM Patient Care and Explore and Focus committees considered requirements of the rotations to be satisfactory and chose not to issue incomplete grades or have students make up those lost 2 weeks. Surgery clerkship leadership sent email correspondence to all of the sites with students and asked them to proceed with clinical grading and to take into consideration each student's overall trajectory when assessing their performance.