9.5 Short, sharp and social: “Levelling up” your MedEd game with social media
Tracks
Botanical 1 room
| Thursday, October 23, 2025 |
| 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM |
| Botanical 1 room |
Details
Format: Non-academic verbal presentation (30-minute)
Speaker
Dr David Lam
Director
Flinders SA Regional Training Hub
Short, sharp and social: “Levelling up” your MedEd game with social media
4:30 PM - 5:00 PMAbstract Overview
This presentation provides practical tips to make rural clinicians more familiar and confident using social media to create engaging and effective medical education material for the modern trainee doctor and medical student.
It outlines how the social media series, “GP Lyf Hacks” (gplyfhacks.com.au), created for rural generalists in training in South Australia during COVID-19, has been used to effectively teach medical professionals, its audience having since grown exponentially to up to 22,000 listeners per podcast and 1,000,000 viewers per video world-wide.
Participants can expect a practical outline of how, as medical educators, they too can leverage the on-demand accessibility, creativity and punchiness of social media content on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Spotify to make learning more relevant, digestible and engaging for rural doctors and medical students.
It is important to be familiar with effective content creation on these online platforms because it is an effective tool in overcoming distance and isolation as traditional barriers to rural and remote training.
Furthermore, with trainee and medical student numbers rising across rural Australia and clinical placements becoming more scarce, social media represents innovative ways to help learners contextualise every patient encounter and make every learning opportunity count from day one of placement.
It outlines how the social media series, “GP Lyf Hacks” (gplyfhacks.com.au), created for rural generalists in training in South Australia during COVID-19, has been used to effectively teach medical professionals, its audience having since grown exponentially to up to 22,000 listeners per podcast and 1,000,000 viewers per video world-wide.
Participants can expect a practical outline of how, as medical educators, they too can leverage the on-demand accessibility, creativity and punchiness of social media content on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Spotify to make learning more relevant, digestible and engaging for rural doctors and medical students.
It is important to be familiar with effective content creation on these online platforms because it is an effective tool in overcoming distance and isolation as traditional barriers to rural and remote training.
Furthermore, with trainee and medical student numbers rising across rural Australia and clinical placements becoming more scarce, social media represents innovative ways to help learners contextualise every patient encounter and make every learning opportunity count from day one of placement.
Biography
Dr David Lam, host of the "GP Lyf Hacks" podcast, is a South Australian rural generalist anaesthetist, 2019 RACGP National GP of the Year and 2023 University of Adelaide Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.
He is a passionate rural generalist registrar supervisor, having worked across both regional South Australia and Far North Queensland, and is the Director of the South Australian Regional Training Hub at Flinders University.
As a former senior lecturer at Adelaide University Health Simulation, he has a keen interest in healthcare simulation and the innovative use of digital technology and social media in medical education.
