As Some US Medical Students Heed Call to Action, Others are Sidelined Amid Pandemic

Army of students impatiently await marching orders even as some of their schools bench them during the greatest fight of their young lives.



Muhammad Sarib Hussain is among a burgeoning number of advanced medical students who have been asked to enlist in the US “war” against the coronavirus outbreak.

Already, a number of schools around the United States have decided to offer their graduating students early diplomas as state officials plead for reinforcements for staff in overburdened and beleaguered hospital systems.

Hussain, a member of Harvard medical school’s class of 2020, is one of the graduating students who will have the option to quickly deploy into Massachusetts hospitals. He is currently in Pakistan with his family ahead of Ramadan, but he’s leaning toward coming back to the US.

“This was what we signed up for, right?” Hussain said. “If there’s a fire out there, firefighters can’t sort of count themselves out.”

He’s not alone in his sense of duty right now, but he is among the few who have been given a path to action. There’s a much larger army of medical students in the US impatiently awaiting their marching orders even as some of their schools bench them during the greatest fight of their young lives.

“I just feel like I’m being sidelined at a time when the world needs help medically the most, and it’s frustrating for me,” said Haley Shumway, who attends the Rocky Vista University college of osteopathic medicine.

Coronavirus has completely upended medical students’ lives as learning goes virtual, schools restrict direct patient care to varying degrees and graduation ceremonies lose their pomp and circumstance. A student population accustomed to planning years in advance is being told to sit tight even as their country is in dire need of the skill sets and specialties they have been developing for years.

“I feel like I’m in this limbo place, where I have training to help, but I’m also being told to stay at home,” said Kelly McDermott, who graduates from Eastern Virginia medical school this year.

Adam Eddington, a student at Dartmouth’s Geisel school of medicine, was working in pediatrics when he was pulled from patient care by his school. Even though Covid-19 hasn’t affected children as much as other demographics, Eddington gets that it wouldn’t be fair for him to progress normally in his training while so many of his peers can’t. Still, he wrestled with his school’s choice for a bit.

“I think all in all it was the right decision,” he said. “As far as I know, it’s unprecedented, and it’s gonna take a lot of work to make sure that we adapt and move forward to try to get all the experience and get all the qualifications that are necessary to make us really good physicians. But I have faith in the systems in place to try to do that.”

Many students learned that they would be temporarily removed from direct patient care a few weeks ago, around the same time that the Association of American Medical Colleges issued guidance on the subject.

Alison Whelan, chief medical education officer for the AAMC, said her organization encouraged members to suspend clinical experiences because of personal protective equipment shortages, a lack of widely available, rapid testing and the need to limit contact between people as much as possible. She and her colleagues have since reiterated their guidance, unless there’s a critical local need for healthcare workers.

“A lot of us understand that we aren’t the most essential as medical students, ’cause we’re learning. But at the same time, a lot of us wanted to be involved and wanted to learn how to handle situations like this in the future,” said Sara Grant, a student at the Oakland University William Beaumont school of medicine.

The suggestion doesn’t mean students have to stop learning, Whelan said, or even that their rotations have to end. In practice, it’s been handled in different ways, depending on the school.

At Oakland, Grant said she and her classmates were participating in virtual lectures, working through interactive cases and physical exam videos, and doing other supplements to try to troubleshoot for what they were missing in-person. Similarly, Dartmouth moved almost entirely online, and Eddington said students like him suddenly had access to a series of non-clinical electives as well as swiftly organized Covid-19 ethics and microbiology courses.

Shumway wasn’t given guidance from Rocky Vista for a week and a half, beyond studying for exams. But eventually, the school sent an email asking students to fill support roles in and outside the hospital – everything from comforting overflow patients to triaging over the phone.

At the University of California, San Francisco school of medicine, students were not categorically removed from patient care, except for known or suspected Covid-19 cases.

John Davis, associate dean for curriculum at the school, called it an “educational imperative” to give especially his most advanced learners the opportunity to watch people who are responding to the crisis in real time before they in turn assume some of those responsibilities.

“Ultimately, I do think that the students who are graduating now will graduate with additional skills and competencies that other cohorts might not have had, which is being able to respond to a pandemic,” Davis said.

Students who have had their clinical experiences put on pause aren’t just twiddling their thumbs. Even before Shumway got more detailed direction from her school, she was scrounging up ways to use her medical knowledge outside of a patient care environment. After hearing a lot of dangerous rumors and pseudoscience circulating around the coronavirus pandemic, she decided to make a podcast that set the record straight.

Vitamin C and essential oils can’t cure Covid-19, she explained. Saunas and hot baths won’t prevent infection, either. And swishing vinegar doesn’t do much of anything to fight the disease, despite a meme her friend posted on Facebook claiming otherwise.

“I’m not comparing the common cold to this virus, but the common cold is also a virus. And has your mother ever asked you to go swallow some vinegar to get rid of your cold? No,” she said.

Other students are babysitting for physicians, donating blood, volunteering at food drives, rounding up personal protective equipment from local businesses, or even just providing accurate information to their networks as panic and fake news around the pandemic spreads.

“Those things are meaningful now, and they need to believe that,” Whelan said.

Meanwhile, some are already readying themselves for the next time their country calls.

“Life is really, really short, and it should be spent wearing yourself out, trying to help people,” Eddington said. “And if that means that I get worn out trying to help people in the next pandemic, then that would be fine.”

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