David Topps, Doug Hall, Roger Thomas, Michael Tarrant
Alberta has just launched a rural based Residency stream and it was clear from other such initiatives that the educational content would be closely scrutinized. To enhance the educational resources available to these Residents and to monitor the quality of the educational experience, we launched a project using palm-sized computers. Devices were provided to all residents and to key faculty members. Based on our experiences with previous projects, we preloaded a suite of medical software and also supplied some custom-written applications. In order to foster collaboration with urban-based faculty and to increase the critical mass of users who could then act as a peer resource group, parallel funding was also obtained to provide key urban faculty with the same devices. Our previous attempts to introduce portable computing have foundered but the many valuable lessons learned have shaped this into a successful introduction. Many of these lessons are applicable in a wide range of settings and budgets - this hands-on workshop will explore the traps and pitfalls of such initiatives, how they can be surmounted and how these tools represent a significant shift in educational methods that can be applied even in harsh physical or economic environments. Many of the barriers that have made the introduction of informatics resources untenable in under serviced rural and urban environments, such as security, power, maintenance, can be addressed by focusing on these low cost devices.