A GP Guide to e-learning resources

Luke Koupparis is a Bristol GP and the Medical Editor for Onmedica

There are many online resources aimed at primary healthcare professionals in the UK. However, it can sometimes be difficult to know which one to use and what services each one offer. Luke Koupparis has been working as the Medical Editor for Onmedica for the last five years. In this capacity he has written this short review, which will look at www.onmedica.net in greater detail, list some of the benefits that the site provides, and summarise the other websites.

www.onmedica.net was formed in the year 2000 by merging two of the UK's largest information sources for medical professionals - ukpractice.net and medideskonline.com. The philosophy behind the site is to provide robust evidenced based learning resources that may help improve clinical practice. It also aims to put provide current evidence about new drugs and to relate these to daily clinical practice.

Why use onmedica.net? There are many sites to choose from that offer education to healthcare professionals (others are listed below). This site does not claim to say that it caters for every aspect of online learning but it des provide a wide range of GP-oriented materials and aims to provide a framework where all learning (both offline and online) can be recorded in addition to providing information on key issues that may affect patient care.

Resources on onmedica.net The site is an online learning portal that provides a number of free resources primarily aimed at GPs. The resources serve to provide general reference and also can be used as part of a personal Development plan (PDP). A PDP Tracker tool is available for use on the site. This allows items read on the website (and other learning activities) to be recorded under the GMC PDP headings and also integrated into other applications such as the NHS Appraisal Toolkit.

The main features of the site that are of use to clinicians are listed below.

Articles: the site produces a number of authored articles on various topics related to GPs. These tackle subjects such as microlinguistic skills for consultation or more clinical topics such as managing chronic kidney disease in practice. A useful feature on all articles is the ability to add comments at the bottom of the article - sometimes these can be as interesting as the article itself, and the system givers users a chance to share their experiences and opinion with the rest of the medical community!

Interactive courses and cases: there are now over 100 hours of continuing medical education in the form of courses and cases on the site. These are learning modules that test knowledge through a number of bite-sized sections. They are flexible in that they can be stopped and started allowing flexible working. On passing a module a certificate is awarded that can be printed out or added to the PDP.

Journal Round-up: this area of the site is invaluable to anyone who finds it difficult to keep on top of reading medical papers. Every day, new journal abstracts are added and every two weeks a GP picks the most clinically important and comments on how these will affect practice. The list of the most important abstracts with comments is helpfully then emailed out to you.

Training: there is a section of the site dedicated to GP registrars that contains excellent practice MCQ questions for MRCGP with model answers and further reading. Well worth alerting registrars and also as resource for any tutorials.

Medical news: there is a daily medico-political news service aimed at primary care. This is often ahead of many of the papers like Pulse and also alerts you to any potential news items that patients may come in with in real time. It covers important clinical trial results reported at conferences, and new drug approvals as well as NHS, Department of Health and NICE developments and is available as a free RSS feed.

The site is completely free to use and offers loyalty points to regular users that can be redeemed for a variety of products and services. It is able to provide free independent content by offering sponsored presentations (optional) to doctors on various clinically related topics in the Medicines Interactive section of the site. There is also a limited amount of other sponsored material on the site (e.g. educational modules, but these are always clearly marked).

Further e-learning resources

As mentioned, there is a wealth of information on the internet and one should not be confined to just using one site. The following sites are valuable to clinicians in a number of ways.

www.gpnotebook.co.uk is clearly aimed at GPs and is an excellent resource to use whilst in a consultation. The content is linked together in a very intuitive way that allows finding information easy. The search facility seems to always find what you need. It is primarily an online encyclopaedia of medical conditions but also allows a PDP tracking facility.

www.doctors.net.uk is one of the most well known of all sites aimed at doctors. It is aimed at any clinician working in the UK and not merely for GPs. It provides a popular email service as well as heavily populated chat forums. The site also provides online learning resources for most specialties in addition to other elements such as medical news.

www.univadis.com is a relatively new player and is offered by the pharmaceutical company MSD. They offer an aggregate of information from a number of external sites as well as their own medical news. Phil Hammond writes on a weekly basis on light-hearted issues. Some features of this site that are particularly useful are the free text messaging service and free Trafficmaster access. One of the draw backs of this site is the number of emails they send out, which can sometimes be high.

www.bmjlearning.com is a site run by the BMJ editorial team and is aimed solely at online learning and recording of information. The site hosts a large number of learning modules, although you now need to be a member of the BMA to access it for free.

The future

Where is all of this going in the future? Well, if you look at the way the web is moving you will see that many sites are offering two way interactivity. Many sites such as Wikipedia allow visitors to make changes to the sites themselves. The next generation of internet tools such as Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007 and Windows Vista will allow people to aggregate and customise the information they want to see. Many other sites that allow users to upload and flag popular content are now gaining in momentum- these are sites like YouTube (videos), Flikr (photos) and networking sites such as Facebook.

So, we may have the ability to create our own mobile intranets using websites containing the information we all use on a daily basis to practice. Perhaps, PCTs may even start offering their information and guidance in the form of RSS feeds. Could we see NICE offering a consultation document that clinicians can make comments upon and share in real time - I doubt it but they should!

Conflicts of interest: Luke Koupparis is Medical Editor of www.onmedica.net

If you have any suggestions about how we can improve this section email them to contact@bristolgpsolutions.org.uk