Medical Education during Disaster: Navigating the 2025 Hat Yai Flood and a Synthesized Narrative Review of Global Disaster Pedagogy
Abstract
Disasters profoundly disrupt the continuity of medical education, challenging institutions to maintain academic progression while ensuring student safety and psychological well-being. This article presents a two part analysis of disaster medical education. Part 1 provides a qualitative institutional reflection on the operational and pedagogical adaptations implemented for undergraduate medical students by the Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, during the catastrophic 2025 Hat Yai flood. It highlights the dual core challenge of balancing academic continuity with structured, tiered student deployment intended to support clinical service capacity during extreme staffing constraints while adhering to rigorous ethical and safety frameworks, demonstrating how authentic crises offer rich learning opportunities that complement high-fidelity simulations. Crucially, it illustrates how adversity may facilitate an adaptive mindset, professional reflection, and prosocial engagement when supported by robust institutional safeguards exemplified by the institutional ethos of prioritizing the benefit of mankind as the first priority. Part 2 provides a comprehensive narrative literature review of the global literature regarding medical education in disaster settings, identifying five core thematic domains: (1) structural curricular agility and rapid operational pivots, (2) low-tech, high-touch resilience during infrastructural failure, (3) competency-matched student deployment bounded by strict ethical safeguards, (4) proactive micro level psychological infrastructure and duty-hour regulation, and (5) adaptive work-based assessments tailored for crisis environments. Together, this synthesis offers a strategic blueprint and a multi-pillar conceptual framework for medical educators to lead with both strategic wisdom and humanistic empathy during institutional crises.
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