Online Education

The point, really, behind this blog is for me to have a think about online education and how I use it.

Six months from the end of my Emergency Medicine career I discovered the excellent Life In The Fast Lane blog, a great resource for education in Emergency Medicine. One of their posts presented a table of other EM blogs and podcasts, and through this I discovered EM-Blog, Emergency Medicine Updates, Emergency Medicine Forum and The Central Line. And of course the not-quite-as-cool-as-it-thinks-it-is-but-still-quite-cool EM:RAP.

Every doctor has that experience: you come across a clinical question and think “I must look that up later”. Really good doctors actually do it; for the rest of us, sometimes the inevitable happens and life intervenes. The resources above are awesome precisely because they take all those little questions buzzing around in your brain - when does a pregnancy test turn positive (and negative)? where are we on oxygen in MI? what’s the evidence for parasurgel? - and answer them in a very accessible and friendly way.

At the same time thanks to my friend Tom I’ve been introduced to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) (I know, a bit behind the curve).

A RSS reader like Google Reader will drag all the updates from your favourite websites & blog to one place where you can absorb all the information. When you install an application like Reeder on your generic 3G phone that can drag all this stuff together from you on the move – well, now you’re really cooking.

All this won’t be news to most web-savvy people. But this is postgraduate medical education as I like it. Bite size, useful and to the point. It’s a brave new world to a lot of doctors though, used to text books and libraries (which certainly have their place). A continuous drip-feed of education, though, is easy to digest, and can become almost addictive to evidence and research-hungry docs.

So, to the point. This blog will hopefully draw together online educational resources in anaesthetics, inspired mainly by Life In The Fast Lane. This will hopefully turn into an education resource

Naturally it’ll follow what I’m doing – first (fumbling) steps in anaesthetics, followed by working for the primary, and then the final, plus the work on medical education I hope to do in the next few years.

And of course, some running. And surfing.

And cheese.

My cheese! All mine!

No. 001

Not a great name, I'll grant you. The backslashes will make a url and filing posts difficult. And I'm not really sure if the bauhaus font I'm thinking of is quite as trendy as I think it is. They're the three things I want to be good at though. Gas first:

1. Gas.

Passing gas, really. I've spent three years training to be an Emergency Physician (A&E doctor) but the bits of it I really loved were the rotations in anaesthetics and intensive care. Most Emergency Department docs find these the most boring months of their training - they want to be back in the ED, where the action is. I liked the quieter, more structured atmosphere of theatre and ICU, though. After a lot of thinking and talking to experienced and clever people I applied for an anaesthetics training job.

Now that my EM exams and rotations are behind me, I start in Royal Devon and Exeter hospital in the South West of England next month. The first major hurdle is the ‘Primary’ – a word guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of any anaesthetic trainee. A multiple choice question paper and then a clinical exam with a viva a few months later. It hurts really bad, apparently.

So I need to:

- Decide when I’m going to sit it

- Work out how I’m going to revise

Endless excitement awaits me ;)

Well, that's all pretty dry, isn't it? I hope run and surf are going to be more interesting!