Abstract

Clinical Skills Updated During the Pandemic

Author(s): Alwin Puthenpurakal

At the time of writing this article, we are at 23 Million COVID19 cases worldwide, with just over 800,000 dead (Coronavirus Update (Live): WorldoMeter, 2020). The word Pandemic is becoming an idiom synonymous with a crisis that is shaping global healthcare systems. It shouldn’t be a word to describe solely the current epoch rather, how it will shape the societies of the future. Similarly, to when the term once had a different meaning “pandemos’’, meaning “all the people’’. The Greek physician Hippocrates became the first to give this term a medical association. Society as we know it is slowly morphing and adapting to a state of existence never anticipated before. This showcases the strength of mankind that is, adapting to changing environments. If we are good at one thing, this is it: our resilience and primordial genes assist us to adapt around situations and scenarios to continue to build ourselves and others, for mutual merit or for crafty degeneration. Ever since the efforts in Wuhan to combat the virus circulated across the internet, healthcare professionals have been applying their knowledge and skillsets in a new environment and at pace which has never been programmed into a clinical skills training session. A new dimension to the practice of medicine was emerging in the harshest conditions known to healthcare professionals. Extremely long hours and the inadequacies of personal protective equipment’s, not only tested the tangible manufacturer’s capacity of producing protective materials under huge demand, but also the true grit of each and every individual who worked in a hospital and especially the ones that were at the bedside of a deteriorating Covid-19 patient.