Behind the Scenes at St Emlyn’s

Hello again 🙂

We’d like to think you might have missed us a little in the last ten days or so when the St Emlyn’s blog has been offline (if you hadn’t noticed our absence, please nod and smile – it’s what we British people do).

As you can see we’re back and more than a little relieved – and we are really sorry for the brief hiatus BUT it does give us a great opportunity to provide you with a little more information about the inner workings at this, Virchester’s finest healthcare institution.

St Emlyn’s: An International Hospital

St Emlyn’s is truly a virtual hospital; the medical staff come from all over the UK to work here, most without ever actually leaving their houses. But there’s a little more to it than that. The physical virtual space in which St Emlyn’s exists is a real place – in Western Australia.

The Father of FOAM: Behind the Scenes

As you probably know, FOAM was conceptualised at ICEM 2012 in Dublin over a pint of Guinness – but for more than five years before ICEM 2012, Life in the Fast Lane had been doing its thing; sailing the as yet unnamed ship of free, open access medical education into uncharted waters. And at its helm – the inimitable Mike Cadogan.

Image courtesy of Domnhall Brannigan

Mike is key to the success of St Emlyn’s. When the virtual hospital opened its doors shortly after ICEM, Mike was on hand to guide and advise. Since those early days Mike has not only been our go-to guy for the more technical aspects of social media, coding, search engine optimisation and blogging (if it sounds like I know what I’m talking about here I apologise because I really don’t) but he also helped us to migrate the whole site over to a server he runs in Western Australia (together with a collection of other FOAM blogs).

In the last few weeks the servers have been under attack from hackers to an unprecedented degree, taking most of the co-hosted blogs offline. Thanks to Mike’s hard work it looks like most are back up and running.

Why are we telling you this?

Well, obviously we didn’t enjoy our time offline – but mainly we wanted to use our first opportunity back online to express our collective wholehearted love and gratitude towards Mike for all of his hard work.

Mike, we wouldn’t be where we are without your input. We certainly wouldn’t be back online again. We – and I’m sure I speak on behalf of the whole FOAM community here – are so grateful for all your help and hard work! And we want you to know – YOU’RE AWESOME.

Cite this article as: Natalie May, "Behind the Scenes at St Emlyn’s," in St.Emlyn's, June 6, 2015, https://www.stemlynsblog.org/behind-the-scenes-at-st-emlyns/.

1 thought on “Behind the Scenes at St Emlyn’s”

Thanks so much for following. Viva la #FOAMed

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