Image from Torange

A lesser known fact about my career is that I have worked intermittently in medical science for quite several decades. One of my earliest jobs back in the 1980s was managing the educational technology and learning resources for several nurse education centres across the South West of England. During this time I also worked closely with several leading NHS surgeons and physicians as they developed new techniques and explored new technologies. I was involved for example in documenting the early trials of laser surgery, Lithotripsy and Transurethral resection of prostate surgery, ultrasonic surgical aspirators and initial research into skin cloning (tissue culture) for burns victims in UK hospitals. I was also responsible for implementing computer based education for nurses and midwives in 1984, and experimented with satellite video teleconferencing for nurse training in 1989. It was fascinating exploring these new technologies, and we all learnt a lot in those pioneering years.

Later, as an education academic I collaborated with several medical scientists to write position papers in a range of technology applications in bioscience and medicine. Indeed, my top three all-time cited academic publications are:

Wikis, blogs and podcasts: A new generation of web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education (2006)

The emerging Web 2.0 social software: An enabling suite of sociable technologies in health and health-care education (2007)

How smartphones are changing the face of mobile and participatory healthcare: An overview, with example from eCAALYX (2011)

Each of the above papers has so far received more than 1000 academic citations, and each was co-written with Maged Boulos and other medical academics. Maged is a prolific researcher and writer, and it was a privilege to collaborate with him on some of the most seminal medical technology papers of the last two decades.

Our collaboration started after I received an email out of the blue from him back in late 2005. He told me he had just arrived to take up a post at Plymouth University direct from his previous university in Egypt, and wanted to know if I would be interested in working with him on some research. He had read some of my previous papers, and was interested in seeing if we could take our ideas forward in the emerging area of social media and medical education. The rest, as they say, is history. We published eight papers in total, and each in its own way informed us of where we should focus next on our exploration of social media, smartphones and other allied technology. We made certain that every one of our jointly authored papers was published in high-profile open access journals, and this helped to ensure wide availability of our work to the medical and education communities.

Exploring medical technologies by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.