Abstract Details

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant reduction in clinical exposure and bedside teaching for medical students, which risks furthering neurophobia amongst the current cohort of students. Innovations in virtual teaching/learning can increase active participation in neurology clinical reasoning worldwide. 

Report the development of a global, open-access clinical reasoning conference created to increase access to neurology education during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Neurology Virtual Morning Report (NVMR) is a case-based clinical reasoning conference held weekly on Zoom, open to participants around the world. In NVMR, a volunteer learner presents an unknown neurology case to two volunteer learners and an attending neurologist. The attending facilitates the learners’ discussion focusing on integrating underlying biomedical sciences with clinical semiology, formulating and refining a problem representation, developing and prioritizing a differential diagnosis, and performing and interpreting a hypothesis-driven neurologic examination.

The first 50 Neurology VMRs had a mean of 47 participants per session (IQ range: 13). Learners who have presented or discussed cases represented 15 countries with the majority being from the United States (49.4%), Peru (16.4%), and Brazil (7.5%). Women represented 43.4% of discussants, men 55.3% and one of the discussants identified as non binary. The majority of participants were medical students (72.4%), with the remaining participants being neurology residents (9.2%), internal medicine residents (9.2%), and non-neurologist attending physicians (9.2%). 

Virtual neurology clinical reasoning conferences allow for active participation from medical students and non-neurologists worldwide, and have the potential to increase global access to neurology education.