Bucher Joshua, Donovan Colleen, McCoy Jonathan
Department of Emergency Medicine, Rutgers - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 1 RWJ Place, MEB 104, New Brunswick, NJ, 0890, USA.
Int J Emerg Med. 2018 May 24;11(1):27. doi: 10.1186/s12245-018-0189-4.
Free open access to medical education (FOAM, #FOAM) is the free availability of educational materials on various medicine topics. We hope to evaluate the use of social media and FOAM by emergency medical services (EMS) providers.
We designed an online survey distributed to EMS providers with questions about demographics and social media/FOAM use by providers. The survey was sent to the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) EMS Listserv of medical directors and was asked to be distributed to their respective agencies. The survey was designed to inquire about the providers' knowledge of FOAM and social media and their use of the above for EMS education.
There were 169 respondents out of a total of 523 providers yielding a response rate of 32.3%. Fifty-three percent of respondents are paramedics, 37% are EMT-Basic trained, and the remainder (16%) were "other." The minority (20%) of respondents had heard of FOAM. However, 54% of respondents had heard of "free medical education online" regarding pertinent topics. Of the total respondents who used social media for education, 31% used Facebook and 23% used blogs and podcasts as resources for online education. Only 4% of respondents stated they produced FOAM content. Seventy-six percent of respondents said they were "interested" or "very interested" in using FOAM for medical education. If FOAM provided continuing medical education (CME), 83% of respondents would be interested in using it.
Social media is not used frequently by EMS providers for the purposes of FOAM. There is interest within EMS providers to use FOAM for education, even if CME was not provided. FOAM can provide a novel area of education for EMS.
免费开放获取医学教育资源（FOAM，#FOAM）是指各种医学主题的教育材料可免费获取。我们希望评估紧急医疗服务（EMS）提供者对社交媒体和FOAM的使用情况。
我们设计了一项在线调查，分发给EMS提供者，其中包含有关人口统计学以及提供者对社交媒体/FOAM使用情况的问题。该调查发送给了美国急诊医师学会（ACEP）的医疗主任EMS邮件列表，并要求将其分发给各自的机构。该调查旨在询问提供者对FOAM和社交媒体的了解以及他们将上述内容用于EMS教育的情况。
在总共523名提供者中，有169名受访者，回复率为32.3%。53%的受访者是护理人员，37%接受过基础急救医疗技术员（EMT-Basic）培训，其余（16%）为“其他”。少数（20%）受访者听说过FOAM。然而，54%的受访者听说过有关相关主题的“在线免费医学教育”。在将社交媒体用于教育的受访者中，31%使用Facebook，23%使用博客和播客作为在线教育资源。只有4%的受访者表示他们制作FOAM内容。76%的受访者表示他们“感兴趣”或“非常感兴趣”将FOAM用于医学教育。如果FOAM提供继续医学教育（CME），83%的受访者会有兴趣使用它。
EMS提供者不常将社交媒体用于FOAM目的。即使不提供CME，EMS提供者也有兴趣将FOAM用于教育。FOAM可为EMS提供一个新的教育领域。
