National Academy of Burns India (NABI) online tutorials: Pursuit of excellence in burns education

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden halt in the academic activities of many medical professionals including burns and plastic surgery. Worldwide, this led to many societies switching over to various virtual platforms like Google Meet and Zoom for teaching and training. In India, as the other plastic surgery societies started their educational webinars, the National Academy of Burns India (NABI) also geared up for its web journey for imparting burn education to doctors and the general population.

Webinars were conducted in four series - acute burn care, post-burn reconstructions, video demonstrations of burn procedures, and research in burns. The first series included a specialist from an allied department. To reach the public and non-medical population, the burn tutorials for general awareness were live-streamed on social media, and the teaching was done in the form of a panel discussion between the speakers and moderators.

A total of 54 webinars including 29 for professionals and 25 for the public were conducted between October 2020 to December 2023 in four series. The participation of professionals on the virtual platform was comparable to a burns conference and an extremely encouraging response was received to the NABI tutorials conducted on social media for the public.

NABI webinars showed that education in burns is possible on a virtual platform under special circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic and can be used as an adjunct to regular teaching and training. The public awareness webinars also served as readily available resource material for the general population.