[display_podcast]
Date: 30 December 2012
Title: The Best FOAM/#FOAMed of 2012
For the last show of 2012 we decided to list the top five FOAM sites. To help compile the list we invited Lauren Westafer who is a fourth year medical student in Florida. A theme of TheSGEM is for medical information to bubble up rather than trickle down.
.
.
.
.
What is FOAM? 

Free Open Access Meducation (FOAM) was dreamt up over a few pints of Guinness during the ICEM conference held in Dublin June 2012. It as been described as “medical education for anyone, anywhere, anytime”

FOAM or #FOAMed (with Twitter hashtag) includes all sorts of on-line resources (blogs, websites, FaceBook pages, podcasts, YouTube, Google hangouts, Twitter, etc).  It is a decentralized, free, cloud sourced, movement that has exploded in the last six months since its inception. Check out our 2012 top Five FOAM/FOAMed to learn more.

Lauren Westafer’s Top Five FOAM:
  1. Life in the Fast Lane: LITFL is a medical blog and website dedicated to providing online emergency medicine and critical care insights and education for everyone, everywhere… usually with a healthy dose of UCEM good humour, and always with endless enthusiasm.
  2. Free Emergency Talks: This page is was created by residents of the Temple University Hospital Emergency Medicine program to help distribute the vast Emergency Medicine lecture library of Dr. Joe Lex.
  3. Academic Life in Emergency Medicine: This blog aims to give you a “behind the scenes” peek into this exciting specialty of Emergency Medicine. We aim to bridge the traditional world of academia and the modern world of social media as medical educators interested in emerging technologies.http://academiclifeinem.blogspot.com/
  4. St. Emlyn’s Blog: 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. Our numbers are growing every day
  5. Twitter: Twitter is a social media app that lets people connect and communicate in 140 characters or less. Perfectly suited for the short attention span of typical emergency physicians. Here are some great FOAM twitter sites to follow:  @FOAMstarter and @FOAM_Highlights.

Ken Milne’s Top Five FOAM:

  1. WashU Journal Club: On the third Thursday of every month, the Washington University Emergency Medicine attending physicians, faculty, residents, fellows, nurses and medical students meet at a local restaurant for journal club. During these three hour meetings the group, lead by the Journal Club Director, critically analyze recent literature using Evidence Based Medicine principles: patient preferences, clinician expertise, and scientific findings each weighted equally.
  2. Free Emergency Talks: Lauren and I both picked this amazing site started by Dr. Joe Lex. This site has over 2,100  lectures recorded at many national and international meetings.
  3. EMCast: This site and podcast run by Dr. Amal Mattu mission provides a user-friendly clinical resource that is designed to be the premier educational website for Emergency Physicians.
  4. EMCrit: This is a blog and podcast by Dr. Scott Weingart. It is devoted to bring the best evidence-based care from the fields of critical care, resuscitation, and trauma and translate it for bedside use in the Emergency Department (ED). Bringing Upstairs Care, Downstairs One Podcast at a Time
  5. TheNNT/SmartEM: David Newman is an Emergency Physician and Director of Clinical Research at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. He has the website TheNNT and the podcast series SmartEM. One give a great quick reference on a topic  while the other does a “deep dive” on the literature.

KEENER KONTEST:

Last weeks winner was Claudia Martin from Canada. She correctly knew that the soft drink company Coca-Cola popularized the modern day image of Santa Claus in its early 20th Century ads.

Listen to the podcast to hear this weeks Keener Kontest question.

Email your answer to TheSGEM@gmail.com or go to the “Contact Us” link at the top of the home page. Use “Keener Kontest” in the subject line. First one to email me the correct answer will win a cool skeptical prize:)

Make a New Years resolution to cut the knowledge translation window down to less than 1 year. Register for SkiBEEM 2013 Feb 4-6 at SilverStar BC.  Get all the latest, greatest, BEST evidence in emergency medicine from 2012.

Looking forward to podcasting more shows in 2013. Be skeptical of anything you are taught, even if you are taught it on The Skeptics Guide to Emergency Medicine.