Redeployment Training for Physicians During COVID-19

As the COVID-19 surge loomed in the United States, physicians, advanced care providers and nurses not usually involved in inpatient or critical care have been redeployed or are preparing for redeployment into these settings. Some primary care providers and specialists have found themselves providing care in environments that they haven’t worked in for years.

Comprehensive redeployment training

The need for comprehensive re-deployment training for ICU and non-ICU providers has become paramount. To meet this need, Cleveland Clinic assembled a multidisciplinary team that included members from its Respiratory Institute, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Center for Technology-Enhanced Knowledge and Instruction (cTEKI), and the Office of Interprofessional Learning. The team has developed a web-based learning platform with up-to-date, relevant and easy-to-access information germane to the position where a provider might be deployed.

“Despite extraordinary measures to prevent community spread in Ohio, officials were still predicting that as many as 2,500 ICU beds at Cleveland Clinic might be needed, says Neal F. Chaisson, MD, Director of the Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Program at Cleveland Clinic’s Respiratory Institute. “Our approach to education, as with all things, had to be fundamentally different.”

Now available to providers outside Cleveland Clinic, the platform Dr. Chaisson’s group created provides COVID-19 specific resources, including biweekly recorded webinars with answers to frequently asked questions on each topic. There are topic-based modules intended to refresh basic critical care and internal medicine skills. The modules are listed by specialty, and include:

• Pulmonary
• Cardiology
• Infectious Disease
• Renal
• Endocrine
• Hematology/Oncology
• Neurology
• Nutrition
• Ethics

In addition to the training curriculum, the platform contains a searchable best practices document, a series of just-in-time management guides for inpatient caregivers and COVID-19 resources for outpatient providers. These guides include a comprehensive, searchable compendium of 110 common ICU and inpatient medicine topics. Each topic contains a concise, smartphone-friendly explanation of what to do when the clinical situation at hand occurs. Continuing medical education credit is available.

To access these resources or enroll for applicable live courses, providers can access the platform here.

These activities have been approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™