Medical Students Are Essential to Nonclinical Medical Education Research During COVID-19.

To the Editor:

Alshak and colleagues have demonstrated the benefit of medical student involvement in clinical research during the COVID-19 pandemic. [1] We would argue students have played a beneficial role in nonclinical research as well.

In September 2020, we created the MedEd Collaborative with the aim of providing students, trainees, and early-career researchers with opportunities to continue their development of research skills and to increase research capacity during the pandemic. Supervision is provided by advisory members who are senior lecturers in medical education. We followed existing guidance on creating research collaboratives [2] and recruited members through social media and medical school contacts.

Our projects represent over 2,000 experiences of student clinical assistance during the pandemic, involving more than 40 student collaborators across the United Kingdom. Students have gained experience performing literature reviews, [3] focus groups, surveys, [4] qualitative and quantitative data analysis, and writing. [5,6] Our findings have been presented at the Association for Medical Education in Europe conference and Association for the Study of Medical Education conference in the Research Paper Award session.

We agree with Alshak and colleagues that students who cannot participate in clinical clerkships should consider clinical research as a pathway to continue their learning. However, we have demonstrated that there is equal opportunity with nonclinical research. Through our approach, we have created a community of practice around collaborative medical education research. As a community of practice, the MedEd Collaborative can facilitate skill development, [7] and as a research collaborative, it can allow early participation in high-quality research. [8]

To ensure this initiative can continue postpandemic, we have joined the National Research Collaborative, a network of other research collaboratives that provides support, and we have received advice from senior members of the National Institute for Health Research Incubator for Clinical Education Research. We plan to complete at least one collaborative project and recruit new members annually.