The Impact of COVID 19 Restriction on Attendance Rates of Educational Sessions in a Pediatric Residency Training Program

Background: Residency education in the traditional form became increasingly challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Programs had to find innovative methods while ensuring adherence to social distancing restrictions imposed as a consequence of COVID 19. A significant shift from traditional class lectures to online education sessions in the form of web-based learning was implemented by many training programs to circumvent this problem. We hypothesized that this new way of education may have increased resident attendance at educational sessions compared to the traditional methods implemented by training programs.

Methods: We included all pediatric residents who were exposed to both in-person and virtual learning at the time of the study (October 2020). Attendance records maintained by the program were reviewed and data was stratified based on year of expected graduation (Class of 2021 and Class of 2022). Attendance rate percent was calculated as: Number of educational sessions attended/Number of total sessions held X 100. Attendance rate percent during the pre-pandemic (Traditional method; July-September 2019) period was compared with attendance percent during the pandemic period (Virtual Learning; July 2020-September 2020). Statistical analysis was done using chi-square to compare attendance percent between the two groups with the p value set at 0.05 for significance.We made a comparison of percentage change in attendance rates for online educational sessions during the months of July–September 2020 COVID 19 period with the attendance rates for in-person educational sessions from July–September 2019 pre COVID 19 period .

Results: There were 23 residents that met the study criteria, 11 residents from the graduating class of 2021 and 12 residents from the graduating class of 2022. In 2019, we had a total of 54 lectures during our study period (July - September). Thus, the expected total attendance for the 23 residents would be 1242 (23 X 54). There were a total of 62 educational sessions during the study period in 2020 for a cumulative expected attendance would be 1426 (62 X 23). The cumulative attendance in 2019 was 451 for an attendance rate of 36% and in 2020 was 722 for a rate of 51%, a 15% increase in attendance rate (table 1).There was significant association of increased attendance rate with virtual learning for both classes. (table 2)

Conclusion: Our results show that there was a statistically significant increase in attendance rate of educational sessions after the implementation of virtual learning, irrespective of level of training. This may be due to increased access to the sessions, especially when the residents are unable to get to the conference room due to the location of their clinical work. Although not a given, increased attendance is likely to result in increased knowledge and better clinical performance. Virtual learning should be considered as useful tool in the post pandemic era.