Online learning in the time of COVID-19.

COVID -19 has had a significant impact on the practice of travel medicine, not surprisingly due to the various travel bans and restrictions by numerous countries, resulting in a lack of travellers seeking advice as the critical need to fight this new pandemic becomes ever more evident. Travel medicine practitioners around the world will have seen their travel clinics cease to operate. This may also have had significant impact, especially if running a specialist clinic in a dedicated setting. While some practitioners can be deployed to roles to help in the COVID-19 battle, others may have become de-skilled in general patient care, or indeed have some personal reasons for not being able to engage such work. At some point in time in the future however, travel medicine practice will be in even greater demand again and anecdotal discussion informs that in times of lull in the past such as during the Ebola outbreak in 2014, this is the case. So, who knows what might happen but realistically, provision of care may be in shorter supply due to some businesses ceasing to continue with the severe economic impact.

For many reasons, there's a sense of needing to continue as ‘normal’ as possible in these unprecedented times and prepare for a time when life will return to usual activity. As we all learn to work more remotely, undertake meetings electronically through necessity, the ability to use such information technology (IT) methods is bound to increase. And as some people have more time to occupy in a meaningful way, opportunities also arise. Courses have rapidly been launched around COVID-19. Here are two examples:

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) have joined up with FutureLearn to deliver a free course developed by public health experts and is entitled ‘COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus’. It's intended for those working in or around health, or anyone interested in how we should respond to the outbreak. The course is presented in English, with translations provided in Chinese, Spanish (ES), Portuguese (BR), French and Italian. This course is free to undertake over a period of 3 weeks with a suggested 4 hours of study each week, culminating in the provision of a course certificate. The course is intended as an educational tool and topics covered are 1) How COVID-19 emerged and was identified; 2)How COVID-19 spreads; 3)Public health measures for COVID-19 worldwide and 4)What is needed to address COVID-19 going forward. See https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/covid19-novel-coronavirus.

The World Health Organization has launched a free certificated course entitled ‘Emerging respiratory viruses, including COVID-19: methods for detection, prevention, response and control. The course provides a general introduction to emerging respiratory viruses, including novel coronaviruses. The intended learning outcomes are to be able to describe the fundamental principles of emerging respiratory viruses and how to effectively respond to an outbreak. Four modules cover the nature of emerging respiratory viruses, how to detect and assess an outbreak, strategies for preventing and controlling outbreaks due to novel respiratory viruses, what strategies should be used to communicate risk and engage communities to detect, prevent and respond to the emergence of a novel respiratory virus. Each module also provides additional information resources and the duration of study is approximately 3 hours. The learning appears to be available in twelve other languages apart from English. See https://openwho.org/courses/introduction-to-ncov.

On the subject of COVID-19 resources, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow (RCPSG) to whom this journal is affiliated, have a page dedicated to a number of resources found at.

https://rcpsg.ac.uk/covid-19. Regular webinars are now taking place as well and recording of these can be accessed freely within the digital education section.

Lastly and be no means least, the Faculty of Travel Medicine (FTM) RCPSG have launched their regular hub of educational resources called Emporiatrics but in these challenging times have made the provision open access instead of the usual membership only status. The FTM have members ranging from experts at the highest level in travel medicine, to those new to practice so to provide an educational hub like this is no mean feat, but it's hoped there is something in there for everyone. Within this edition which is fully mobile device friendly there are features on topics such as travelling with cancer, expedition and wilderness medicine activity, post tropical screening, travel service provision, updates on yellow fever, polio, malaria, dengue and much more Faculty of Travel Medicine activity. There is also a section in relation to TMAID and a special recording of the eponymous David Livingstone lecture delivered by the Editor in Chief of TMAID Prof. Patricia Schlagenhauf entitled: Anti-malarials for travellers - from the Livingstone era to the 21st Century. See https://rcpsg.ac.uk/college/this-is-what-we-do/emporiatrics-spring-summer-2020-edition and the images below illustrating some of the content.