Deploying Medical Students to Combat Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Problem

Displacement of students from clinical rotations disrupts their education and creates gaps in their knowledge, including about the pathogen responsible for the interruption in their education.1, 2, 3 We have an opportunity to close this gap in medical education and address the general public's need for guidance from the medical community about COVID-19 by engaging medical students as leaders in sharing knowledge about COVID-19 with the general public.

Approach

Physicians from the University of Minnesota created the online course “COVID-19: Outbreaks and the Media” to engage students in the COVID-19 pandemic response and teach them skills for communicating about medicine with the general public. Through this course, medical students learn about COVID-19 in a manner that facilitates rigorous evaluation of the evolving sources of information. Students engage in public service to the medical profession, and our patients, by amplifying high-quality information about COVID-19 on social media.

We created the following learning objectives:

• •Describe previous pandemics, including lessons learned about effective and ineffective responses
• •Assess the quality of media reporting about COVID-19
• •Apply professional fact-checkers’ techniques to assess the credibility of media
• •Critically assess medical and scientific literature and translate it for a lay audience
• •Utilize social media to connect people with accurate information about COVID-19
• •Apply principles for public health messaging as a physician

Sample assignments

• •Create a video demonstrating techniques to assess the bias of websites
• •Create a social media action plan using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication Manual's worksheet
• •Create an infographic using open-access tools
• •Correct misinformation on social media
• •Create a video sound bite
• •Write a blog post on a topic related to COVID-19
• •Create a Tweetorial

As this course was developed, a curriculum document was created for other institutions to use which can be accessed through the following website https://z.umn.edu/COVIDmediaCurriculum.

Outcomes to Date

Together, 10 students accumulated more than 25,000 Twitter “impressions” after 2 weeks of class. Twitter impressions are the number of times a tweet is seen on a user's screen.

Next Steps/Planned Curricular Adaptations

The long-term goal of this curriculum is to equip students with skills necessary to engage with the general public about COVID-19 and other medical topics in a manner appropriate for our profession. The next steps could include assessments of students’ ability to apply “fact-checker” techniques to determine the quality of medical media outside of a classroom setting or outside of COVID-19 and/or following this cohort of students’ ongoing activities on social media. Alternatively, this curriculum could be adapted for more general medical communication training for medical students outside of a pandemic.

The impact of students’ social media presence is a unique and scalable contribution to the pandemic response from the medical community; an alternative framework for being on the frontlines. The template for this curriculum is highly adaptable and open dissemination will allow other institutions to teach and empower their medical students at this time when many students feel disconnected from medical education.