Retired Plastic Surgeons as Educators During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Retired Plastic Surgeons as Educators During the COVID-19 Pandemic Sammy Al-Benna1
Received: 9 September 2020 / Accepted: 10 September 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature and International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 2020
Level of Evidence V This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 There are an estimated 46,300 plastic surgeons worldwide [1]. More than one-third of all physicians are 65 or older [2]. At this very moment, there may be 15,000 retired plastic surgeons around the world. Our life’s work and our identity as plastic surgeons deeply motivates our desire to help during this worldwide pandemic, yet we recognize that we are now considered a high-risk population [3–6]. It is during this time of wanting to contribute that inspired me to share this perspective [3–6]. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, medical schools and universities have quickly switched the entire medical undergraduate and postgraduate surgical curriculums to online formats that include content in the basic sciences and health systems sciences [3, 4]. This undergraduate and postgraduate-oriented educational paradigm change requires online teaching and mentoring for medical students and surgical trainees, together with the creation of educational materials [3, 4]. This process has inundated many surgical educators who have synchronous academic and clinical demands. Retired plastic surgeons constitute a valuable and frequently underutilized resource for surgical training & Sammy Al-Benna [email protected] 1
Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Academic Hospital, Francie van Zijl Drive, Tygerberg, PO Box 241, Cape Town 8000, South Africa
programs. Heads of Divisions of Plastic Surgery should explore opportunities to integrate retired surgical colleagues into their educational programs. Retired plastic surgeons, within their skills and knowledge, can provide online teaching, education materials and mentoring for medical students and plastic surgical trainees. Retired plastic surgeons have extensive clinical experience, pattern-recognition skills, and reasoning abilities and can therefore share the wisdom and lessons learned during their careers in surgery with younger colleagues [7, 8]. In particular, over the course of their careers, retired plastic surgeons have developed the emotional intelligence that enables them to teach trainees valuable strategies for COVID-19 stress by remaining composed [7, 8]. With encouragement, these retired plastic surgeons can support a variety of virtual educational activities including multidisciplinary team oncology meeting, morbidity and mortality conferences, online simulation training, mock oral examinations, problem-based learning sessions for surgery r
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