Open Access

Anja Mayer

• In recent years, the use of online teaching methods in medical education has increased, and in times of recent crises such as war or the COVID-19 pandemic, it is becoming even more important. Online teaching is one way to maintain medical education in times of crisis, and virtual patient (VP) collections are a suitable tool to train clinical reasoning (CR) in an online environment when access to patients is limited. Although careful plan-ning of a VP collection is a crucial aspect, it is often neglected in the development of digital collections. Therefore, the Erasmus+ project iCoViP (International Collection of Virtual Patients) was launched in 2021 to plan and deliver a multilingual collection of 200 VPs. After the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the VPs were translated into Ukrain-ian and implemented at 14 Ukrainian medical schools, as an extension to the project. As part of the iCoViP project, this doctoral thesis aimed to develop a methodology for designing realistic VPIn recent years, the use of online teaching methods in medical education has increased, and in times of recent crises such as war or the COVID-19 pandemic, it is becoming even more important. Online teaching is one way to maintain medical education in times of crisis, and virtual patient (VP) collections are a suitable tool to train clinical reasoning (CR) in an online environment when access to patients is limited. Although careful plan-ning of a VP collection is a crucial aspect, it is often neglected in the development of digital collections. Therefore, the Erasmus+ project iCoViP (International Collection of Virtual Patients) was launched in 2021 to plan and deliver a multilingual collection of 200 VPs. After the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the VPs were translated into Ukrain-ian and implemented at 14 Ukrainian medical schools, as an extension to the project. As part of the iCoViP project, this doctoral thesis aimed to develop a methodology for designing realistic VP collections for learning CR and to identify the current needs of students, faculty, and staff of medical schools in Ukraine. In publication 1, I proposed a four-step approach, including a modified Delphi approach, that can support educators in planning a balanced VP collection to train CR. In publica-tion 2, I found that the quality of medical education in Ukraine was threatened due to the war because of disruption of teaching, financial restrictions, increased workload, and mental stress. As a result, among other things, there was an unmet need for more prac-tical training and modern teaching resources. The VP collection of the iCoViP project can be considered representative of the Euro-pean population and has been implemented at Ukrainian medical schools without the need for any adaptations. By implementing the VPs, we have been able to meet some of the needs of medical education in Ukraine, such as substitute for patient encounters, or more case-based and learner-centered teaching methods.…