About

Currently, finding out about medical education events is dependent on social media, word of mouth, mailing lists, or manually searching through multiple different websites. There are many challenges to this, from emails not getting forwarded on to not being on social media at the right time. Ultimately, this leads to difficulties in finding events relevant to training needs, arranging study leave and missed opportunities to expand clinical knowledge.

The Coronavirus pandemic led to many in-person events being cancelled, missed opportunities, and has left many feeling a need to catch up. We want to help make events as accessible as possible by being able to find them all in one place. We hope that this site can make that process easier and have tried to design it with users’ needs in mind, to be able to search from the very broad “all events” through to very specific subspecialty-level.

We will accept events that are:
Open to attendees nationally – Those for attendees only from a specific region should be advertised locally
Relevant to Paediatrics, Emergency Medicine or no specific clinical specialty- We hope to expand to include other specialties in the futureRelevant to the healthcare system, guidelines and curricula of healthcare professionals working in the United Kingdom
We will NOT accept events that:
Could cause conflict-of-interest with healthcare professionals in line with professional bodies- for example, events sponsored by formula milk companiesAre life support courses (APLS, ALS, ATLS etc)- though this is an area we look to expand to in the future

• “Submit” form above
• Regular event organisers can be set up to have their own account to add/edit listings themselves
• Set up an automated feed from an external website to import into our listings
• For paediatric events, if your event is CPD-Approved by RCPCH, it will automatically be imported via a feed link from https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/education-careers/courses/cpd-approved-course

It is possible for us to automatically import events from other sites through iCalendar feeds, which reduces manual work, means listings are timely and importantly can keep up to date with the organisers website (e.g. if an event sells out and there is the option to add to a waiting list. Setting up a feed is as per the https://icalendar.org/ standard and uses the fields as in the below example. The site runs through The Events Calendar plugin and there is the option to set up a demo for testing – https://theeventscalendar.com/demo/ ,or please email admin@fomohub.org

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:

(then below set up for each event)
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID: (A Unique Identifier to recognise the event and prevent duplicate importing)
SUMMARY:Event Title
DESCRIPTION:This is the description text of the body with \n line breaks
DTSTART:Date and time stamp for start of event – ideally set up as “form#3” from https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-3-5-date-time.html to account for daylight savings
DTEND:Date and time stamp for end of event – ideally set up as “form#3” from https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-3-5-date-time.html to account for daylight savings
URL:https://urlofwebpage.url
LOCATION:Venue name, if the same as one of our recognised venues/previously used then it will match up for street address function
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image:http://urlofanimagetoimport.url
END:VEVENT

END:VCALENDAR

Some events will have a range of ticket prices dependent on job role or the number of days attended so it is not possible to only have one “price” field to be able to search by. All listings should have the cost visible in the event’s description

We hope to expand to include all clinical specialties, and include a repository of wider development resources of podcasts, blogs, interest groups and clinical fellowship jobs which can also be filtered in similar ways to the calendar.

As the site grows and we look to expand across other specialties and functions, we need a bigger team to help the site evolve. If you are interested in being involved, with no particular skills or experience needed (just enthusiasm!), please e-mail admin@fomohub.org