The COVID19 pandemic has limited the opportunities for senior medical students to gain exposure to the field of anesthesiology through away rotations or interviews. By creating this "Virtual Pre-Op Call," opportunity, we hope to offer an interactive educational experience for interested medical students as well as provide an opportunity to learn more about institutional culture through an open Q&A with a program's trainees and faculty.
Our proposed Learning Objectives are:
1. Facilitate active group collaboration among fourth year medical students and teaching faculty, fellows, or residents, in working through pre-operative cases.
2. Discuss important components of pre-operative evaluation and clinical considerations contributing to anesthetic and perioperative plan.
3. Explore anesthetic management for a variety of case types including: cardiac, transplant, pediatric, neurological, and general surgery.
4. Establish a better understanding of individual institution/program teaching methodology and overall culture.
Before rolling this out on a larger scale, we hope to run a few focus groups and pilots for those interested in participating/contributing. The time commitment would be a couple of hours/week on Zoom (generally in the evenings) while testing scenarios and adjusting the experience based on your feedback. Please sign up below if you're a 4th year medical student applying to anesthesiology and interested in being part of the pilot!
A couple additional notes:
- At this point, this is a PILOT with a single physician running the program. The overarching goal will be to expand the program beyond one person as it is built.
- Joining in for calls and focus groups for the pilot program is 100% OPTIONAL. The goal is to make this as useful of a resource for MS4s applying to anesthesiology in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic.
For questions, please email Amanda Xi, MD (
amandasximd@gmail.com).