COVID-19 Throwing a Wrench in Residency Plans

In a survey of 812 rising 4th year medical students, researchers found that the COVID-19 virus has resulted in a substantial change of course for many who were planning on applying to orthopedic surgery residencies.

The researchers were from Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York and the University of Miami/Miller School of Medicine in Miami, Florida. Their work, “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Orthopaedic Surgery Residency Applicants During the 2021 Residency Match Cycle in the United States,” was published in the November 2020 edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons: Global Research and Reviews.

Co-author Nicholas Danford, M.D., M.A., a 4th year orthopedic resident at Columbia/Presbyterian, told OTW, “We saw that a lot of students had rotations canceled and other aspects of their progress toward residency disrupted due to COVID, but we did not have a good way to quantify what we saw, so we decided to pursue a quantitative analysis of medical students and challenges they were facing.”

“Did they think they had enough exposure to orthopedics to pursue it as a specialty? Did they worry about aspects of their application such as letters of recommendation because they wouldn’t have enough time with mentors? What percentage of students felt this way, and how strongly did they feel this way? These questions hadn’t been asked by the time we did, which was a few months into the pandemic.”

A total of 462 (57.7%) medical students responded that they were applying to residency in orthopedic surgery; 389 of those (84.2%) stated that they were “definitely” applying. The authors wrote, “Compared with those not planning to apply to orthopaedic surgery, participants who said that they were planning to apply to residency in orthopaedic surgery were more likely to be men (71.2% versus 27.7%). Race also varied significantly, with non-Hispanic White students, indicating that they were planning to apply to residency in orthopaedic surgery at a higher rate than those identifying with other races…”

As for men, only 5.5% of those applying to orthopedic surgery were less likely to apply because of the pandemic, compared with 14.9% of women. On the race front, students planning to apply for an orthopedic surgery residency who identified as Black/African American said that they were “less likely” to apply compared with students identifying as non-Hispanic White (16.9% versus 8.8%). A full 88.9% of these medical students said that they were afforded “somewhat fewer” or “many fewer” opportunitites for adequate exposure to orthopedic surgeries (which would help them select a specialty).

Dr. Danford: “I’d say the most important results and implications were that an overwhelming number of students said that COVID made them worried about their application from numerous perspectives, and I hope the study is a bit of a push toward potential mentors of students (and residents, although this study was about medical students rather than residents) that there is a need to be proactive toward reaching out to mentees who otherwise might feel a little adrift, without guidance during the general upheaval that is COVID-19.”