PODCASTS for students

Introducing Jane McKenzie, and her top 3 favourite podcasts for medical students.

Podcasts can be one of the most useful ways to absorb information when you’re on the go or sick of staring at a book or screen. I’ve always found choosing a topic to focus on one of the hardest parts of studying the vastness of medicine, and podcasts are a great way to get an overview of a topic in small, user-friendly chunks of time. Here are some of my favourites from the past couple of years:

FOAMcast – Easily my favourite medical podcast, each episode presents different topics with an ICU management bent. The first half is usually dedicated to new literature and knowledge in the area, with the second dedicated to basic knowledge and clinical pearls. The presenters are likeable and present the information in a fun and enthusiastic way that draws you in.

Texas Tech Medcast – Produced with a focus on preparing students for the American USMLE Step Examinations, these podcasts present information via a clinical case or example exam question. Their Geriatric series is especially useful, drawing questions from the Step 2CK Prep Series.

Pedscases.com – Paediatric podcast created by medical students, for medical students, with overviews of all the useful key topics in paediatrics based on clinical scenarios. This kept me engaged in the case and helped to apply the theoretical knowledge to clinical situations.

For more student-friendly podcasts, check out those our other readers suggested on this page.

Jane McKenzie

Jane is a final year student at the University of Melbourne. She has long had an interest in how technology can be used to shape how people receive information, especially after starting medicine and trying to tackle the mountain of resources available online! She has experience in putting together websites and resources in a useful way as the Technical Officer for the University of Melbourne Medical Students’ Society in 2014 and 2015. Jane first became interested in the FOAM movement through interest in Emergency and Intensive Care medicine, and hopes to continue working in these areas.

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Are students getting FOAMed?

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How aware are Australian medical students of FOAM? Are they using it? Of those who are using it, what are their favourite resources when they’re in a pinch for time? We’ve explored this and more, and presented our preliminary results in a poster at SMACC Chicago, which was a hoot. We thought we’d share these results with you too.

Check out our electronic poster here:

SMACC2015 Are students getting FOAMed poster

Authors: Alison Gould @intransition2 | Samual Ognenis @SOgnenis | Charlotte Alexander @_CharAlexander | Viet Tran @drvtran | Victori Brazil @SocraticEM

We’ll let you know when the full publication is out.

Pharm FOAM- where to get more of it?

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Introducing Emily Wiener, completing her Doctor of Pharmacy degree, here to fill us in on all things pharm.

According FOAMedstudent.com’s poll, pharm resources are in high demand amongst med students. As a pharmacy student, I’ve definitely had to dive into the depths of the internet to find the pharmacy FOAM out there. In order to make the navigation a little easier on the rest of you, I’ve compiled some of the great clinical resources I’ve come across.

For general drug information which is available without a subscription, globalrph.com is a site with numerous drug resources. They have charts and tables of drug classes (i.e. statin equivalency chart), drugs broken down by disease states, normal lab values, and renal dosing information. It isn’t the most frequently updated site and therefore isn’t the most reliable for guideline based medicine. Another wealth of information is empr.com, it includes drug monographs and drug charts. In order to access some of the features of the site you do need to create a free account. It’s a great site to use to stay up to date on new drug approvals, newly generic drugs, and drugs in the pipeline.

Meded101.com is a blog containing information about common (or commonly forgotten) drug-drug interactions, polypharmacy, and basic med info. The moderator of the site is also quite active on Twitter (@mededucation101) with frequent tweets about med interactions or things to keep in mind when selecting meds.

There are a number of blogs which regularly post pharmacy relevant evidence based medicine topics. Geared for ambulatory care pharmacists, iforumrx.org (@iforumrx) regularly has peer-reviewed posts mostly about chronic disease state management. Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (www.aliem.com, @ALiEMteam) has a variety of emergency medicine related topics including peer-reviewed relevant pharmacy/toxicology posts, tagged as “Tox & Medications”. empharmd.blogspot.com is a blog which provides a pharmacy point of view on all things emergency medicine. For cardiology EBM posts, HeartMeds has an extensive archive which is well tagged for easy to find posts sorted by drug. One of the contributors of HeartMeds has his own EBM blog called The Unit (www.reedrx.com/unit, @brentnreed) which is mostly heart-failure specific.

Finally, don’t forget perhaps the greatest pharm related resource, your clinical pharmacist. Ok maybe I’m a little biased but the dynamic interactions with your clinical pharmacist (or pharmacy student) are great learning experiences for all parties involved and have been shown to improve patient outcomes.

Please feel free to post your favorite pharm FOAM in the comments section.

Emily Wiener is finishing up her final month of her Pharm.D. degree at University of Maryland in Baltimore, Maryland. Following graduation, she will be pursuing a PGY1 residency at Sinai Hospital Baltimore. Her interests include emergency medicine, HIV, and pharmacy education. An avid #FOAMed supporter, she can be found @PharmDEMily.

Follow Emily @PharmDEMily

A new adventure ahead…

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As the new medical year begins for many students, FOAMedstudent.com would like to invite you on a journey of medical knowledge. We can hold your hand remotely, while you navigate the stormy waters ahead.

Our website offers a FREE, open access journey, featuring interactive, interesting and innovative learning methods, including YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts and much more.

The best part? It’s an exciting and effective method of study, to help you improve your understanding, clinical practice and (hopefully) performance!

The FOAM, or #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medicine) movement grew from humble origins and has largely developed from the passion of Emergency & Critical Care Physicians around Australia, and the world (including the mothership of all FOAM sites Life in the Fast Lane website).

Countless websites and online learning resources have since started identifying themselves as #FOAMed, and a newbie med student could easily get swallowed up in their own distraction! A student-focused website has been developed, to provide you tried and tested, effective resources already available out there… and keep you from frantically googling every new word you hear and ending up just staring at pictures of cute kittens… or the motorbike you want.

Come and participate in the #FOAMed movement, and eventually you may even find yourself contributing to the global body of knowledge.

FOAMedstudent.com will help you find resources for whatever clinical rotation or biomedical unit you find yourself in in 2015. Check out the resources we’ve collected, to help you focus as you navigate all the FOAMed out there. For example, if you start your anatomy labs and your brain starts hurting, try this page. If it’s the group learning style (PBLs) that stress you out, browse the case’s topic under clinical links. We try to make sure our links are student-friendly. That is, short, to-the-point, snappy morsels of education, for students always on the run.

Join the #FOAMed movement here, on Facebook, and on Twitter (or by searching with the hashtags #FOAMed and #FOAMedstudent).

Best of luck for your studies in 2015.

Ali (@intransition2)and Sam (@SOgnenis).

Ali Gould
Final Year
University of Melbourne

Sam Ognenis
Final Year
University of Western Australia

It’s time to tell the FOAM-creators what we want!

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Some results are in…. The students have spoken. These are the top subjects you want to see more of in the world of FOAM… (not sure why you want more Emergency Medicine- it’s riddled with it out there!)

Results as at 4th December 2014… and counting….

This is your last chance to vote before I pass on our needs, wants and demands to some very motivated physicians and trainees at ACEM ASM. Get in quick for your voice to be heard. Follow this link to the poll to vote now. Students Represent!

Free RIPPER Flashcards!

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We have an exciting announcement to make. Our very first guest interviewee Benjamin Pons (@bdpons), brings gifts just in time for our end of year exams. Ben is about to graduate from Notre Dame University Sydney (Australia) this year. We have such pleasure sharing with you his awesome set of flashcards that you can subscribe to, download and use FOR FREE!

Ben has been creating and sharing his flashcards with mates since his first year in medicine, and to date he has developed over 11,000 cards. He is now generously opening up access to the cards with the wider medical FOAMedstudent community. What a guy!

Here we talk to Ben about how his cards came to be, why he chose the medium he did to build and share them, and why he thinks other students might benefit from sharing their study notes too.

Ben Pons and his little brother

Ben how did your cards come to be?

The cards originated out of wanting to be “exam-ready” and “ward-round-ready”. I would go through my university’s learning objectives and try to formulate questions around them. I would also make notes of what questions I would be asked whilst at hospital and in previous exams and add them to the collection.

How do flashcards help you and your mates?

Things can get pretty hectic during med school and I never have time to mull over long winded explanations in text-books, sometimes, all I need is a refresher… a quick review of basic concepts, principles and inter-relationships regarding certain diseases and treatments. This refresher helps to get my brain in to gear and I also tend to recover some lost cerebral data in the process. Currently, I have 91 students that have signed up to use my cards. Olly Mills, a friend of mine in the year below was particularly influential in promoting the cards to the rest of his cohort and has passed on some great feedback that kept me motivated to make more.

What is the benefit of using flashcards over other types of notes?

I always like to quote that my study regimen is tailored to my short attention span… Basically, if I can’t fit what I need to know on a flash card, I’m going to have a hard time remembering it. Trying to distill complex concepts in to their simplest form is what I aim to achieve with my cards. I believe if you can explain concepts simply then it’s a good indication you understand the subject.

Flash cards also allow you to more accurately gauge how much you know about a certain subject because the answers are hidden from view and they avoid the temptation to simply skim-read without engaging in the material.

You’ve shared your cards with fellow students since you began making them, and now you’re going public – why?

I believe other students can benefit from them. I am also a big fan of free open access medical education i.e. “FOAM” and would like to encourage other students to collaborate and develop their own educational resources to share with their friends and the online medical student community. My appreciation for FOAM originated from my love of free online medical resources, in particular, podcasts such as “EM-Crit” and the well known online FOAM juggernaut “Life in the Fast Lane”. The concept of making peer-developed medical educational resources freely available makes sense to me. The more we can learn from each other, the better off we will all be. There’s a lot of time that went in to developing my cards and they’ve helped me a lot. If other students can benefit from them, I would like to see them continue to be used for many years to come.

How did you decide on what platform to use to create and share your cards?

Quizlet is a great program which allows you to study anywhere, anytime, online or through the Quizlet mobile app. This means I have access to my flashcards wherever I go. There’s also some pretty cool options which allow me to save them as pdf documents or go for the more traditional print off alternative.

As you head out into the working world, is there any final words of wisdom for medical students as you leave us all behind?

I’ve had some great experiences throughout my time in medical school. Coming to the end of the road, I know there are tough times and you have to work hard, but it’s important to balance the serious stuff with some of the more enjoyable things in life. Best piece of advice I can offer is that you should make time for the things you love and have some fun along the way. Hopefully my cards can help in freeing up some extra “fun time” for you.

To access your own free copy of Ben’s extensively peer-reviewed “clinical years” flashcards, click on this link. You will be prompted to set up your own user account (if you don’t already have one), through a painless and quick process. You will then be provided access to the cards. We hope they offer you some relief as we many of you gear up for your end of semester exams.

Keep your eye out in the future for Ben’s pre-clinical cards, which are currently undergoing revision.

This post is open for review. Please contact us if you’d like to officially review this post, and Ben’s Flashcards.

We at FOAMedstudent have no affiliation with Quizlet, or any other company plugged by our site. It’s just one of the many brilliant platforms that make life easier for students around the world.

Help fund FOAMedstudent get to OpenCon 2016

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Founder and moderator of FOAMedstudent.com Ali Gould has been invited to join OpenCon 2016. Thisa three-day application-only conference/meeting is groundbreaking in it’s topic- everything OPEN. The conference seeks to bring together effective, engaged students and early career academics from around the world to advance Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education. The most important criteria is an interest in advancing Open issues, and a commitment to taking action.

Participants get to learn about open access, open data, and open education through keynotes, panels, interactive workshops, and hackathons!

It’s an honour to be accepted- but comes with a problem…. the cost of getting to Washington DC!!! Please give a little to help FOAMedstudent get on the Open Map.

Click on the hat to help out in a small way, with thanks

More about the OpenCon 2016:

Participants will meet other students, librarians, and early career academic professionals from around the world who are passionate about advancing open.

Initiatives that have been founded by OpenCon alumni with support from the community include the Open Access Button, Open Access Nepal, Open Access Nigeria, the OOO Canada Research Network, Open Access Sudan, WhyOpenResearch?, the Open Access Academy, Dissem.in, the Open Research Glossary, and many more.

Participants will learn methods for advancing open: from raising institutional awareness to leading national-level campaigns. The third day will provide a half-day of advocacy training followed by the opportunity for in-person meetings with relevant policy makers, ranging from the US Congress and federal agencies to embassies and key NGOs.

This site draws together FOAM relevant for medical students

about, collaborate, FOAM, FOAMed

What’s FOAM?

FOAM archives are bulging with the ‘sexy stuff’ of Emergency Medicine and Critical Care, and urology, curiously…

How can we find the stuff most relevant to medical students? It’s a jungle of open cricothyroidotomies and debates on thrombolysis out there.

How can we stay focused, and use FOAM to help us get through exams… and even become better doctors?

This site is created and enriched by medical students. It’s riddled with links to FOAMed resources we vote are best suited to us. Tell us if you find more.

This is really a collaborative project, so share to your mates. Watch this space for FOAMed resource reviews, interviews with student FOAM creators, blog posts by FOAMites around the world.