Abstract:

From April 2021, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan issued a policy to provide more problem-based learning (PBL) in class. In this research, we report that we have provided online PBL in specialized lectures for third- and fourth-year Japanese university students. A lecture "Health Communication" held from September 2020 to January 2021, A PBL was carried out. The problems was related to the novel coronavirus infection and the hospital, and various scenes in the hospital were presented in the lecture.

Groups 1 through 5 were assigned from topic 1 to 5. The students considered solutions and analysis to the assigned topic as a group. After a small group discussion, each group reported on the content of the discussion. Next week, a 10-minute presentation using PowerPoint was made by each group. Discussions were held on November 9, 2020, and presentations by students on November 16 were held in an average of 10 minutes for each group. There were 24 students participating.

In topic 1, as the director of a hospital, the students considered what kind of communication would be taken to prevent the spread of infection. In topic 2, the students discussed how to prevent burn-out and turnover of nursing staff. In topic 3 the students discussed how they would interact with their depressed colleague after the her returning from corona hospitalization. In topic 4, the students looked investigated what medical professionals can do to be close to patients in a restricted environment. At topic 5, the students proposed how press conference should be held.

After the class, students were asked to comment on the contents of their work. The content of the comment was analyzed by using KH coder. The most common words were medical care and infection. From the results of co-occurring network analysis, the significance of this case study was the importance of being able to experience the actual situation, to realize that the medical professionals also struggling with communication with patients and fighting infection anxiety, and the importance of thinking about people who are currently suffering from coronavirus.

Keywords:

Case study, coronavirus, problem-based learning, health communication.