Introduction:

The pandemic caused by the new coronavirus (Covid-19) has promoted changes worldwide, including changes in the organizational structure of higher education. Medical education has had to suspend face-to-face activities and practical internships, adopting distance learning methodology as well as online assessments for medical students.

Objective:

To discuss the impact of the pandemic on university students’ mental health and medical education.

Method:

This is a review of the following databases: Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS) and Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE). In the search for articles, the Health Sciences Descriptors (DeCS) used were: “mental health”, “pandemic”, “higher education”, “students”, “Covid-19”. The studies considered were those which involved human beings, literature studies, and published between 2018 and the moment of the data collection.

Result:

The 1,473 articles found in the databases were subjected to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, disregarding repeats in different databases, leaving 43 articles, from which the 31 articles used in this literature review were obtained. There are a large number of experimental studies on higher education, which are useful for disseminating knowledge and enabling replication. The data referring to the mental health of university students demonstrate the presence of psychiatric disorders related to the theme such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, based on face-to-face and online diagnostic screening tests.

Conclusion:

Medical students, under intense emotional burden, are feeling uncertain about the future of their training as a result of these transformations, reporting damage to their mental health. There are also doubts about the repercussions in this context in the “post-Covid” period and the impacts on medical education, as well as the maintenance of the measures which have been adopted during the crisis.

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