A timetable assumes that students can reach a classroom, teachers can arrive, and clinical placements will be available. In a crisis, each assumption needs checking. The educational task becomes much more concrete: identify what students can realistically do this week, what requires supervision, and what must wait until suitable conditions exist.
At the University of Gezira, document analysis and nine interviews describe some courses spread across the semester, Telegram-based materials, supervised clinical centres, mobile clinics, and a War and Health module. These qualitative accounts illuminate adaptations, while long-term educational and health outcomes remain to be established.
For another medical school, a useful starting point would be to make distributed learning manageable. A course team could prepare a weekly learning pack containing one clinical problem, essential reading, a short task and a clear route for questions. A student reconnecting after several days should be able to identify the current task and recover missed work without searching through hundreds of messages. This proposed format gives the course team a simple structure to adapt to students’ circumstances.
Clinical teaching needs equally clear organisation. The World Federation for Medical Education’s standards emphasise an appropriate range of clinical experiences and consistency across training settings. One way to apply that principle would be a common placement record: the intended skill, the learning opportunity, the supervisor’s feedback and the next step. If students move between centres, their learning history should move with them. Attendance alone leaves the receiving teacher with too little information.
A curriculum can also bring the realities of disrupted care into the classroom. Consider a teaching scenario involving a displaced patient whose medical records are unavailable and whose usual clinic has closed. Students could examine how to gather a reliable history, communicate uncertainty, identify their own limits and arrange an appropriate handover. The discussion connects clinical reasoning with the organisation of care. It also gives teachers a way to explore the consequences of decisions beyond the immediate consultation.
Community outreach deserves the same attention to continuity. A systematic review of humanitarian mobile clinics highlights the importance of links with fixed services, patient records, follow-up and referral, while finding limited evidence of overall impact. For an educational partnership, that suggests a concrete planning exercise: before an outreach visit, agree who supervises students, who holds clinical responsibility, and how patients can obtain further care after the team leaves. A valuable learning opportunity must also make sense within the local service.
Evaluation should begin while these arrangements are being developed. INEE’s emergency education standards recommend monitoring learning outcomes and changing needs, with participation from affected communities. A small programme could start with three questions: which students remain out of contact, which required learning experiences are still missing, and which obstacles students and supervisors want addressed first. Reviewing those answers regularly gives the next timetable a clear purpose.