I don’t usually give a blog a shout out in such a primordial state, but with ‘St Emlyn’s Virtual Hospital’ (stemlynsblog.org) I’ll happily make an exception.
There have been some truly exciting developments in the emergency medicine social media world since ICEM 2012. Online interactivity reached stratospheric heights with the #ICEM2012 hashtag on Twitter, involving both those people lucky enough to physically be at the conference in Dublin as well as those of us “languishing” in the far flung reaches of the world without a jug of Guinness in sight… We will likely hear more about this when Mike returns — where is he anyway? Patching up the Western Force during there bruising encounters in Godzone? Or is he still ‘lost’ somewhere within the Guinness brewery?
But I digress.
Since ICEM 2012, two of the world’s most renowned emergency medicine luminaries have joined the twittersphere — @JoeLex5 and @amalmattu — in what is a real boon to social media meducation. Which finally leads me to the real point of this post… The poms look to be really joining in the party with gusto too.
So, what the heck is St Emlyn’s?
I turn to the horse’s mouth:
“St Emlyns is a virtual hospital based in Virchester.”
“In reality we are a team of Emergency Physicians interested in medical education, emergency medicine and critical care. We blog because education matters.”
As well as a blog, the site looks to provide a hub for EMergINg, the Manchester-based Emergency Medicine and Intensive Care research group. This is what’s exciting: there are some really great EM researchers and educators in on the act — the likes of Simon Carley and Rick Body … The other contributors I know less about, but can be assumed to be awesome by association. There are also links to a case-base learning platform StEmlyns classroom (under construction, I think), BestBets, and the StEmlyns team are key leads for the first UK MSc in Emergency Medicine.
Impressive, eh.
But it’s the quality of the blog posts created thus far that demonstrates the real promise of this pommie venture into magical world of FOAM (one of @sandnsurf‘s newer… and, for once, quite good!… FFLAs: Free Open Access Meducation):
About Chris Nickson
Wow! Cheers for that. We are truly excited about the blog following what can only be described as an epiphany at #icem2012. The reach of social media, the potential to speak to an audience of colleagues directly and the opportunity of just getting involved with people around the world who share a passion for what I now know is #FOAM Is just too tempting to miss.
So, since ‘plagiarism is the most sincere form of flattery’ we are looking to emulate the best of blogs such as litfl, resus.me and others.
We have struggled for a theme……and then we decided to blog about stuff that interests us related to EM, and since EM is a broad speciality we may appear like a stream of ideas at times.
Thanks again for the plug, we’ll do our best.
S
These guys at stemlynsblog.org are doing an exceptional work. The blog is pretty new and has caught a lot of attention due to their high quality writing. The saw a gap in #FOAM during ICEM2012 and are definitely filling it with interesting discussions.
Thank you for the new blog and wish you all the success. LITFL thanks for recognizing their work.
Javier