Abstract
IntroductionFree open-access medical education (FOAM) is a collection of interactive online medical education resources—free and accessible to students, physicians and other learners. This novel approach to medical education has the potential to reach learners across the globe; however, the extent of its global uptake is unknown.MethodsThis descriptive report evaluates the 2016 web analytics data from a convenience sample of FOAM blogs and websites with a focus on emergency medicine (EM) and critical care. The number of times a site was accessed, or “sessions”, was categorized by country of access, cross-referenced with World Bank data for population and income level, and then analyzed using simple descriptive statistics and geographic mapping.ResultsWe analyzed 12 FOAM blogs published from six countries, with a total reported volume of approximately 18.7 million sessions worldwide in 2016. High-income countries accounted for 73.7% of population-weighted FOAM blog and website sessions in 2016, while upper-middle income countries, lower-middle income countries and low-income countries accounted for 17.5%, 8.5% and 0.3%, respectively.ConclusionFOAM, while largely used in high-income countries, is used in low- and middle-income countries as well. The potential to provide free, online training resources for EM in places where formal training is limited is significant and thus is prime for further investigation.
Highlights
Free open-access medical education (FOAM) is a collection of interactive online medical education resources—free and accessible to students, physicians and other learners
High-income countries accounted for 73.7% of population-weighted FOAM blog and website sessions in 2016, while upper-middle income countries, lower-middle income countries and low-income countries accounted for 17.5%, 8.5% and 0.3%, respectively
Physicians in emergency medicine (EM) and critical care have been leaders in the trend to rapidly increase the number of online resources that share FOAM content, and recently there have been calls to formally integrate online learning into residency education in the United States.[4,5]
Summary
Free open-access medical education (FOAM) is a collection of interactive online medical education resources—free and accessible to students, physicians and other learners. This novel approach to medical education has the potential to reach learners across the globe; the extent of its global uptake is unknown. FOAM has the potential to fill certain gaps in EM training resources in LMICs. The current content of FOAM represents a diverse array of learning resources from core emergency care basics to cutting-edge techniques such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The current content of FOAM represents a diverse array of learning resources from core emergency care basics to cutting-edge techniques such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation The latter is unlikely to be relevant in low-resource contexts, there
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