Just Completed: Mechanical Ventilation for COVID-19 (online course)

Thanks to the team at @EdXOnline @HarvardOnline and instructors @MiscSusan @RespResource for making this course available to us. It brought me back to one of the reasons I went to medical school as well as filling an important need at a critical time.

Regarding my first point above, the course is a reminder to me of the complexity of intensive care practice. It’s nothing short of incredible. Any news clip/story will fail to show its intensity. With that in mind, I salute the people who are doing this work not just with one patient, but many, at the same time. On top of that, they are creating education for additional colleagues to provide even more support.

You can’t support a person and their family through a crisis like this without the drive and thoughtfulness to think about how to do best by and for them, and how to make the care better. A patient once said to a group of doctors I was in, “thank you for staying awake in medical school.” I say, thank you for staying awake in your 12+ years of post-high school education and on-the-job experience, so you can stay awake for every human you touch physically, emotionally, intellectually.

I'm not saying that we have no room to improve, no room to learn. Of course we do. We always do. But this is not the time to abandon 25 years of well-done research in favor of anecdotes and opinions – many of which are promulgated without even offering biological plausibility.

— Susan Wilcox, MD (@MiscSusan) April 13, 2020

When people like me take courses like this, it’s a sign that we need to be serious, follow the rules, do what we can to avoid getting infected or transmitting infection.