COMMENT | A year after the emergence of Covid-19, the global community continues to contend with the effects of the pandemic, with Malaysia adopting multiple movement control order (MCO) measures to combat the virus. As a result, healthcare education notably medical, dental, and pharmaceutical education - has been significantly impacted with all forms of face-to-face teaching converted to remote learning.

However, healthcare students disagree that clinical teaching can be conducted effectively online, consistent with overwhelming support for a return to clinical placements. The lack of clinical placements has also given rise to arguments and concerns of sub-standard training to clinical practice in the future. It has thus been suggested that Covid-19 vaccine prioritisation for healthcare students could enable a safe resumption of clinical teaching through placements, as carried out in Singapore, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.

In Malaysia, however, healthcare students are not prioritised in the distribution of vaccines. Names and details of dental students were submitted to the relevant ministries but most of them, especially from private universities, were not given their allocations. Healthcare students are categorised under Phase 3 of the vaccination programme, indicating they will be among the last to receive the vaccine. Therefore, the Malaysian Healthcare Students Alliance (MHSA) urges the government to prioritise the vaccination of healthcare students, for the following reasons.

1. The quality of healthcare education is severely affected due to lost clinical placements and hours

The transition of healthcare education to an online platform has significantly impacted its quality. The loss of face-to-face teaching and clinical placements has severely disrupted the acquisition of clinical skills and patient communication skills. Medical education can be broadly split into pre-clinical and clinical medicine, where pre-clinical years of medical school are designed to deliver basic clinical knowledge via laboratory sessions and simulations, while clinical years enable students to start integrating their knowledge into patient care.

Both stages of medical training have been substantially altered by the ...