Students' Awareness as an Underlying Factor for Satisfaction and Compliance

Introduction: As soon as the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, many higher education facilities had to change their educational and teaching strategies to cope with the lockdown. Some medical schools decided to rely on online teaching while others depended on students' self-learning abilities. Methods of assessment also changed as some medical schools implemented pass/fail exams, online examinations, and research projects while others postponed their final exams. In Egypt, medical schools started delivering their lectures online and changed the assessment criteria of the preclinical academic years to depend mainly on research and online exams while postponed the clinical rotations and final exams of the clinical years.

Aim: This study assesses medical students' awareness of the current situation regarding the safety guidelines and their satisfaction with the solutions provided by their schools for the plans to continue their learning and the new assessment methods and criteria.

Methodology: The method used for data collection is an online survey filled by medical students from around Egypt. Moreover, data were statistically analyzed using IBM statistical package SPSS for doing a Chi-squared test on two variables.

Results: After collecting the data and analyzing responses, we found that 66.2% of students who answered the survey do not think that the safety measures taken by their universities after the return back will be enough.

Conclusion: This shows that the basic knowledge of COVID-19 among medical students is average and there is a need to start programs for infection control practices against COVID-19 for all medical students and professionals.