DEVYANI LAL: Greetings, and welcome to COVID-19-- Expert Insights and Strategies. This is a comprehensive curriculum from the Mayo Clinic that is designed for health care personnel from all over the globe taking care of COVID-19 patients. In the next few minutes, I'll give you a brief introduction and overview of what the series is going to be about.
My name is Devyani Lal. I'm the course director of the series. I'm an associate dean at the Mayo Clinic School of Continuous Professional Development. I'm also a professor of otolaryngology and the chair of the Division of Rhinology at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. I'm a passionate educator, and I serve as the vice chair of education at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.
As course director, it has been my endeavor to have a wide and broad curriculum, but also to delve deeper into some of the subject matter that requires more detailed insights. We will start with a broad overview of COVID-19. We will then move on to testing, diagnosis, and challenges associated with those two entities.
The pathophysiology of COVID-19 is very complex, and the critically ill COVID-19 patient requires a multidisciplinary management with systemic therapy that is directed towards multiple systems. And we will share some of the strategies that are being employed here at Mayo Clinic that have resulted in improvement in outcomes.
As the pandemic progresses, it's also vital to continue to care for our other patients, and so we will share some of the protocols and strategies that we have found useful at Mayo Clinic in rebooting our practices safely. Some of those are obvious, masking, testing. But we'll also delve into other strategies, such as environmental control, et cetera.
We'll talk about enhancing safety for critically high-risk procedures, such as aerosol generating procedures, and how we have managed to mitigate some of the risks associated with that. As simple as it sounds, PPE selection, donning, and doffing is of vital importance to understand and adopt, and we will be detailing that in our series as well. COVID-19 has taught us that not all patients can be managed the same for airway. So our experts will detail ways in which they tackle airway management for the critically ill, including ventilator management.
As the pandemic progresses and more and more patients require care, we have had to retrain and redeploy personnel at Mayo Clinic. We'll share some of the strategies in how we conducted the retraining and redeployment. Lastly, as the disease and the pandemic evolve and more data become available, we'll continue to update our series. We'll talk about cutting-edge treatments, such as convalescent plasma therapy. But as data from other treatment strategies, and therapeutics, and interventions become available, we will continue to update the series.
The curriculum matter is actually available for free for all learners globally. However, there is good news if you want to claim credit. Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, and so we are able to offer CME credit, pharmacy credit, and American Nursing Credentialing credits as well. If the activity within the series is accredited, you will see a hyperlink at the end of the activity, and if you click on it, it will take you to the website ce.mayo.edu.
If you already don't have a profile there, you can quickly register and set up a profile to meet with ACCME standards. Some of the activities may require a small fee to comply with ACCME guidelines. But as I said before, if you do not require CME credits, you can actually take this course on for free.
And this has been possible due to an educational grant through Pfizer Incorporated. This independent medical education grant has partly supported the course. The course is, however, made and has complied with all ACCME requirements.
So welcome, and thank you for joining us in this course. Again, I'm based here in Phoenix, Arizona, but this course leans on expertise from all other Mayo sites, including Mayo Clinic in Rochester and Mayo Clinic In Florida. Welcome on this journey.
