Expanding Pre-Hospital Emergency Medicine Teaching through Internationally Livestreamed Academic Forums

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Introduction: Changing expectations in the accessibility of medical education and concomitant increases in inclusion of technology have led to demand for novel content delivery methods in medical education. Classical paradigms of educational preference based on geographical accessibility are gradually being replaced in a progressively online and connected environment by learners' preference for convenience, with selection between educational options becoming increasingly based on the quality of the content, and not necessarily its physical proximity. Livestreaming a medical education programme presents a new set of technical, logistical, and ethical considerations. Cambridge University Pre-Hospital Care Programme delivers a regional academic Pre-Hospital Emergency Medicine (PHEM) teaching programme mapped to the GMC recognised sub-specialty of the national PHEM curriculum and this programme has begun to stream the programme's monthly forums. We describe a literature review on livestreaming in medical education, a summary of our results with livestreaming, and recommendations for organisations interested in similar expansion. Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted by searching PubMed for terms related to livestreamed medical education. This programme began implementation of livestreaming in April 2017. Feedback was collected using Likert scales specific to livestream accessibility and audiovisual quality. Results: Four forums were successfully livestreamed between April and August 2017; feedback was increasingly positive as the programme became more familiar with livestreaming and made technical improvements to the stream. Discussion: This programme provided free, open-access livestreamed PHEM education to students and professionals in diverse fields. We present lessons learned by this organisation in implementation, and evidence that livestreamed medical education from leading experts is both possible and in demand. This has implications for both synchronous and asynchronous medical education; diffusion of medical education to interested parties need not be limited by geography, specialty, or access.