Residency provides clinical training to new physicians. Many programs have started offering online educational content to their residents. These are great resources to learn from some of the leading educators in EM from the comfort of your home. Below is a list of some of my favorites.
I was playing bubbles with a 2 yr old when she wanted a turn. Even though I knew the outcome, she said “peeeze” so I said OK. As predicted, she immediately dumped the bubbles on the floor and started laughing. In the corner of the room I heard the quiet voice of her 10 year old brother say to me, “Excuse me, ma’am… you know there’s an app for that”.
The Social Media Index was moved from BoringEM to ALiEM on the morning of Thursday, November 21st. The increased exposure for my previously obscure little prototype got it a lot of attention. By that afternoon Dr. Scott Weingart (@EMCrit) had weighed in with an audio response critical of the index and requested that EMCrit be removed. This set off a lively discussion on Twitter as a good chunk of the FOAM community got in on this important discussion.
Written jointly by Teresa Chan & Tessa Davis (Guest writer from “DontForgetTheBubbles.com“)
A Brief Background: It seemed like an average Thursday at first. But then, on November 21 (November 22 to some in Australia) controversy struck our little online #FOAMed world. With the launch of the Social Media Index on the ALiEM website, something had existed for almost six months at BoringEM.org suddenly became a point of contention.
The Social Media Index (SM-i) started with a pilot on BoringEM. The rationale for the experiment was that the health care professionals creating Free Open-Access Medical Education (FOAM) resources had no way to measure their impact in the way that scholars (h-index) and journals (Impact Factor) do. This made it difficult for them to quantify the impact of their work and for the consumers of FOAM to distinguish between reputable and unproven websites. While I am aware of the many imperfections of the index as it now stands, I believe the pilot demonstrated that there is enough value in the concept to justify further exploration.
I was delighted to see the News and Perspectives piece in this month’s Annals of Emergency Medicine about “Social Media and Physician Learning” (free PDF). I had totally forgotten that Jan Greene, the author, had called to talk with me several months ago. In the piece, she discusses many of the issues with which I struggle:
Here are some noteworthy quotes:
Dear Program Directors,
I understand how tough it can be to come up with quality resident education to fulfill educational requirements on a weekly basis all year around. For most programs that is approximately 5 hours of conference material, once a week, pretty much every week of the year. That equals 260 hours of educational material that needs to be high yield, engaging, and entertaining enough to hold the attention of the millennial generation. This is an especially daunting task if tackled alone. So don’t do this alone! Start a program-wide Twitter account!