Tweeting from a conference.

If you are following me on twitter you will have noticed many #comet09 tweets in the last two days. There will be more tomorrow as the conference finishes in the afternoon. So what was it about? COMET is an interdisciplinary conference in communication, medicine and ethics. It moves around the world and this year was on my doorstep in Cardiff so too good an opportunity to miss.

I decided to tweet because I thought the content would be interesting to quite a few of the people I know on Twitter. And it was. Some of the things that happened:

• @jrbtrip found out what an old colleague was up to
• @hadleybeeman and I had a discussion about whether patients had the right to not engage in partnership with their GP in their care
• @mrhyde found out about some research on how people who are obese access information on the internet.
• @vmontori who was a co-author of some work that my colleague presented was kept up to date although he was still on the other side of the Atlantic.
• @casesnetwork kept up to date with Brian Huritz's lecture.

And after seeing a presentation about using multiple modalities in drug patient information leaflets I remembered that I had seen a lightning talk about this last week at Health Camp but couldn't remember who. I tweeted and had the answer before the speaker had finished her presentation.

I do seem to have been the only person tweeting from COMET 09, but I predict that come COMET 10 in Boston there will be a few more. This was not about providing a backchannel to the conference, but simply about bringing the contents of interesting dialogues to a wider audience. So if you are listening to someone stimulating, think about tweeting. The chances are that someone you know will be glad that you have made the effort to share.

Where do first year medical students look things up?

In the last two days I have spoken to 31 first year medical students about their early clinical attachments in primary and seconday care. I asked them where they looked up unfamiliar clinical topics. These are some of the responses:

• Wikipedia
• Google
  
• Kumar and Clark
• Medical dictionary
  
• YouTube (especially to find out more about operations)
• NHS Direct/Choices
• Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine
• I didn't look anything up.

Wikipedia was definitely the most common choice. Many students said 'I know I shouldn't but....' and then qualified that they used Wikipedia first because it was easy to understand, they felt it was reasonably reliable, and accessible. One student used it to search directly from her phone when on placement.

I was intrigued by one student who was very keen to distinguish 'learning' which was what he did for exams... spotting questions on past papers and reviewing lecture notes... from 'experience', when he would access YouTube or Wikipedia to find out more about something that really interested him. His reluctance to call this learning reminded me of a third year student I spoke to earlier in the year. We were talking about how she would continue learning for the rest of her life. "That's so depressing", she said. In her mind learning was bound up with exams and assessment.

Should we worry about students turning to Wikipedia so often? Which other resources are just as user-friendly and comprehensive?

I think that NHS Choices is a good place to start.

EDIT: Just to make clear, the first year students I am referring to here are in an undergraduate 5 year course. The first few years of the course are pre-clinical but these early clinical attachements are to give them some initial insights into the world of clinical medicine. Some medical schools in the UK have no distinction between the pre-clinical and clinical parts of the course.