New interactive technology at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital is allowing staff to learn from the very best specialists at some of the most prestigious healthcare centres in North America.

Under the auspices of the newly-formed Department of Continuing Medical Education (CME), hospital employees from heart surgeons to nurses are now able to sit in on lectures broadcast live from overseas, including such places as leading research hospital Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the Washington Hospital Centre and the Lahey Clinic in Boston.

Accredited by McGill University in Canada, the CME programme is proving a real hit at KEMH, with close to 30 hospital staff crammed into a conference room for talk on cardiovascular research yesterday afternoon when paid a visit.

The lecture from Dr. H. Brandis March, an interventional cardiologist at the Washington Hospital Centre lasted for around 30 minutes, with those in attendance able to quiz him in detail afterwards on certain aspects of his presentation. ?The quality of the presentations are phenomenal,? said GP Benjamin Lau.

?To be able to interact with people overseas who are experts in their fields is an invaluable resource for us and is helping the quality of healthcare we deliver at the hospital a great deal. When this programme was just starting out a year ago, the physicians had to fund it themselves ? but now the Bermuda Hospitals Board has agreed to get on board and help with the funding so the whole programme can only improve.?

Medical education via video conferencing and webcasting is becoming an increasingly important feature of healthcare improvements world-wide, said CME Director Dr. Cathryn Siddle, who along with her staff is determined to expand the programme locally. ?Initially we used to fly in people from abroad to give lectures,? she said. ?But due to significant advances in technology we?re now able to benefit from considerable medical expertise without the expense of having to pay for travel. To coin a phrase used by Johns Hopkins, this really is a case of medicine without borders. What started as a relatively small programme has just grown and grown ? but it?s important to emphasise that we are merely building on foundations which were already laid.?

The programme is available to all BHB healthcare providers free of charge and provides for physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists, social workers, laboratory technicians and hospital administration staff.

Healthcare practitioners not included under the BHB who wish to take part can do so for a fee of $15 a lecture, while Dr. Siddle is also hoping in the future to use the technology in conjunction with the BHB?s student programme ? part of an ongoing quest to attract more local students into the healthcare field at an earlier age.

?The potential in this technology is phenomenal,? said Dr. Michael Rosengardten, Dean of Continuing Medical Education at Macgill University?s Health Centre ? the organisation which accredits the local programme.

?The advent of more sophisticated technology including of course the internet has provided us in the healthcare field with a huge range of new and exciting opportunities. We are already archiving a lot of the material on our website where anybody can go and watch presentations from a large number of specialists in their field. We also have established chat rooms now where specialists can get together in totally different parts of the world and discuss questions or issues they might have. This can only benefit the quality of healthcare provision in the long-run and we expect this kind of education and idea sharing to grow exponentially.?