Smartphone and Social Media use for CPD in Wessex

I have finally written up a brief survey I did last year looking at how a selected group of Wessex GPs were using the Internet, Web 2.0 tools and smartphones for their CPD. The link to the document is here.

I had the privilege of presenting a poster of the key findings at the Wessex Educational Fellows 2017 conference. I also learnt a number of things. Firstly, printing on linen is far easier than heavy duty paper. Secondly there’s a fair amount we can share educationally between primary and secondary care. Lastly, there are some very bright & dedicated educationalists around in medicine. The two Keynote speeches were very powerful.

Anyway, back to the paper. You can read it in all its glory but I just wanted to comment on what I feel are a couple of important points.

The population surveyed was only small but I suspect can be generalised to the wider GP population. As GPs, we have a suspicion of Social Media for education. It is not without its flaws but I fear we are missing out on the benefits. In order to increase the uptake, there needs to be training for GPs in how to actually use Social Media, Blogs and Podcasts. Once GPs are using it, we need to grow a Professional Network so we can share best practice, ideas, guidelines etc. For this to happen, GPs need to be convinced of the reliability & educational rigour of the material being disseminated as well as be confident in the security of any on-line discussions.

I would like to extend my huge thanks to those who partook in the survey. I hope to do some further work in the future to explore some of the issues, day job permitting…