Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Mass General Brigham Fellowship Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

JCO Oncol Pract. 2021 Sep;17(9):541-545. doi: 10.1200/OP.20.00894. Epub 2021 Feb 2.

Abstract

The coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic has affected graduate medical education training programs, including hematology-oncology fellowship programs, both across the United States and abroad. Within the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Mass General Brigham hematology-oncology fellowship program, fellowship leadership had to quickly reorganize the program's clinical, educational, and research structure to minimize the risk of COVID-19 spread to our patients and staff, allow fellows to assist in the care of patients with COVID-19, maintain formal didactics despite physical distancing, and ensure the mental and physical well-being of fellows. Following the first wave of patients with COVID-19, we anonymously surveyed the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Mass General Brigham first-year fellows to explore their perceptions regarding what the program did well and what could have been improved in the COVID-19 response. In this article, we present the feedback from our fellows and the lessons we learned as a program from this feedback. To our knowledge, this represents the first effort in the hematology-oncology literature to directly assess a hematology-oncology program's overall response to COVID-19 through direct feedback from fellows.

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19*
  • Fellowships and Scholarships
  • Hematology*
  • Humans
  • Neoplasms*
  • Pandemics
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • United States