Keeping up to date when working and living in a remote location can be very difficult. Sure there are online journals and cd’s from professional organisations to view you but there is not that personal interaction.
I try hard to overcome that by talking and emailing clinical pharmacists, doctors and others I know around Australia on a regular basis. Practitioners working alone, even if in towns or cities may experience the same difficulties when working but may have easier access to face to face meetings than I do.
I use the internet a lot for research and could not perform my job as well without virtually living on email. Last year I discovered Twitter. many of you may have heard of it or used it.
Twitter is a messaging system that allows you to transmit a message of 140 characters that anyone using Twitter may read. You can follow people whose “tweets” you like, and other people may follow you. It sounds like a great waste of time just chatting to others in cyberspace. It can be, but it is a great way of networking and communicating with others with the same interests.
It is a great way to share a link to an article with a brief description that others can then view. I mix with people on a daily basis that would never happen otherwise with me being so remote, and probably would not happen if I was in a capital city. I message and share information with those in medical publishing, a radiologist in India, emergency department doctors in Perth (1 & 2) that some of my mob are evacuated to and many others.
I also chat with Ves Dimov known as @DrVes on Twitter. Ves looks at about 3000 articles a day from high quality blogs and journals and publishes a brief comment and links to many of these on Twitter. The best he also posts regularly into his blog Clinical Cases and Images under the heading “Health News of the Day”
I read a lot of information on indigenous affairs that I could not possibly have the time to blog about. Following Ves’s lead I will be shortly producing blog posts with a summary of the tweets I place focusing on indigenous affairs. I hope you find it of interest.
All the people mentioned in the article have blogs worth reading regularly
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Excellent summary. Also, very inspiring and it shows that in today’s world distances are not a major problem when you want to stay up-to-date and communicate with peers. Thank you for the kind mention.
…and no mention of the fun Twitter contacts.
Ves your summaries have shown me what can be done with this medium and allowed me to get a lot more from it.
Bella one day I may have to write about the fun twitter contacts in my other blog. I’m a man and like to put things in boxes!….this is work only
ah. what a great post – twitter, the interconnective blood supply of news, information and making new friends of which you are definitely one.
You literally put twitter on the map.
Well even Amsterdam comes close. Only “time zones” are separating us.
Just wonder if I wrote in the right box
enough of the nice comments. I don’t have enough bribe money for you all.
Not that I forgot you are a man. Just the boxes. Box closed.