The
history of gp-training.netThis site has been built for altruistic reasons only, as a resource for medical education. It carries no advertising and makes no money.
I work as a GP in Workington, Cumbria and was Lead Training Programme Director of East Cumbria Vocational Training Scheme between 2005 and 2011. I don't have any formal IT training. In my spare time I enjoy digital photography and fencing (hence the Herdwick directory www.herdwickfencingclub.org.uk).
This site started out maybe 20 years ago as www.wellclosesquare.co.uk, in the era of windows 3.1. We were about to get a network in the practice and I was looking for a way to share medical information around the doctors in the practice via a static intranet. I looked at various ways of doing this including windows 3.1 help files, but nothing really met my needs. I really almost stumbled across html - the web was in its infancy. It looked like a simple way to share information, with all the formatting done "on the fly".
I started to build the intranet, but the practice network was delayed by a year or more. I was left with a medical information system which I used on a daily basis and found really useful, so it seemed a good idea to put the information out onto the web for others to use. In those days of dial-up, I also provided a CD-ROM, which was given to all new trainers in the Northern Deanery. (I still produce these on an ad-hoc basis for people who request them, but there are few these days.)
Initially I coded the HTML by hand on a Commodore Amiga, but now use FrontPage.
This was all, by chance, rather ahead of its time, and essentially I cornered the "GP education market" as far as the web was concerned - there is nothing quite like it anywhere else. The site has become well known internationally, and is regularly used by the medical educators and doctors in training. Initially, most of the content was derived from me, but as the years have gone by others have offered contributions. Some of the content is the notes from my teaching and learning. A lot of the content is in note form which is intelligible to those to whom the site is targeted but may not make much sense to the layman.
I maintain the site for purely altruistic reasons, no income is derived from the
site and there is no advertising. I initially got the website structure wrong,
and after a few years I had to revamp the whole site. The site has continued to
expand. A few years ago I altered the style and added a breadcrumb trail. I had
the foresight to add a global .css file which I saw as a good way to refresh the
site in the future. I use
www.freefind.com as the
main search engine,
www.changedetection.com to notify
users of additions to the website, and have recently added an rss feed using
www.rapidfeeds.com. I
have just begun exploring what I can do with css to develop the site, stimulated
by .net magazine!
The site provides information to the users and is largely text based. It has a number of areas based on my areas of interest:
I stopped using a web counter years ago, because, to me, the numbers using the site were not important. I get regular feedback about the site and offers of items to add from medical educators around the world.
Gallery of images used in the site
Brad Cheek