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Welcome to CanadiEM

In Uncategorized by Brent Thoma1 Comment

Happy new year and welcome to CanadiEM!

Three years ago I started a little blog called “BoringEM.” Initially it was a pet project that I developed to serve my own educational needs [1]. However, I quickly began meeting and discussing medical topics with clinicians from around the world. Almost overnight, an online community of practice formed under the banner of FOAM (Free Open Access Medical education) [2,3]. I watched as leaders like Mike Cadogan and Chris Nickson (http://litfl.com, Australia), Michelle Lin (http://aliem.com, United States), Scott Weingart (http://emcrit.org, United States), and Simon Carley (http://stemlynsblog.org, United Kingdom) developed communities that both enhanced emergency care within their country and brought their practices and perspectives to an international audience.

Canada has both benefited from and contributed to this international community. Anton Helman (http://emergencymedicinecases.com) and Ken Milne (http://thesgem.com) have consistently put out high quality podcasts, Justin Morgenstern (http://first10em.com) has been on fire with his blog, and multiple other sites (SOCMOB, EM Ottawa, the Chart Review) continue to contribute. However, we have not coordinated our efforts into a larger national community.

My hope for CanadiEM is that it will foster a community of emergency medicine practitioners that will contribute to this international dialogue and foster the development of online educators while helping to improve care in Canada. We hope to be a go-to resource for continuing education, a great place to publish educational resources, and a “watering hole” to discuss the latest issues affecting healthcare. To that end, we have put together a solid team of editors, recruited an exceptional advisory board, and begun planning a ton of new initiatives.

However, for CanadiEM to become everything that we hope, we will need your help. We hope that our international readers will continue to read (and listen? :), contribute to, and share our perspective on emergency medicine. We will continue to feature work from international writers in the same way that national medical journals feature international researchers. To meet our ambitious goals we are going to need more members on each of our editorial teams (let us know if you’re interested!). Finally, we are looking for ways to engage more of our Canadian readers. Please let our Editors and/or Advisers know us what you like, what you dislike, and what you would like to see covered / discussed on CanadiEM. It’s a work in progress, but our goal is to meet your needs.

To all of the BoringEM and Frontdoor2Healthcare readers, thank you so much for your support. In an effort to spread our work far and wide, we would greatly appreciate your support in launching CanadiEM today. If the vision outlined above resonates with you, please share this post and ask your friends and colleagues working in emergency medicine to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

References

  1. Thoma B Personal reflections on exploring social media in medicine. Int Rev Psychiatry. 2015; 27(2): 161-6. PMID: 25750994
  2. Nickson CP, Cadogan MD. Free Open Access Medical education (FOAM) for the emergency physician. Emerg Med Australas. 2014; 26(1): 76-83. PMID: 24495067
  3. Cadogan M, Thoma B, Chan TM, Lin M. Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM): the rise of emergency medicine and critical care blogs and podcasts (2002-2013). Emerg Med J. 2014; 31(e1): e76-7. PMID: 24554447
Brent Thoma

Brent Thoma

Editor at CanadiEM
Dr. Brent Thoma is a medical educator, blogging geek, and trauma/emergency physician who works at the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine. He founded BoringEM and is the CEO of CanadiEM.
Brent Thoma