The Goodfellow Club's website has now been ticking along diligently for more than seven years.

Originally the site was set up under the umbrella of the Goodfellow Postgraduate CME Unit at the Auckland Medical School, at the time headed by Ross McCormick. The website was tirelessly administered by Dennis Kerins (since moved further afield) and is presently administered by Peter Huggard (acting director and research advisor) under the professorial oversight of Felicity Goodyear-Smith.

Probably many GPs from the northern part of the country would have registered and logged in to the site early on during the "virtual CME heyday". At the time access to the site was a little clumsy, passwords were worse than clumsy and the range of CME options was limited. We were simultaneously being bombarded with relentless CME opportunities through a variety of off-site providers, some of which have been reviewed in New Zealand Doctor over the last two years.

It is important to state the Goodfellow Club has weathered the storm of competition very well. It is also very important that general practice is able to continue to support such an online New Zealand-based CME service and it is perhaps time the Goodfellow Club received some of the limelight.

General practice in New Zealand certainly owes a great debt to Sir Douglas Goodfellow for the funding provided in 1978 to set up the trust bearing his name.

The website itself has been kept simple and, by and large, sticks to what it is good at - providing CME "bytes" with the added charm of MOPS points. The range of topics covered way back five years ago was very limited and probably served to distance itself from a large number of the New Zealand potential user base.

Over time however, the website has evolved with a sophisticated, simple and user friendly "quiz and explanation" format which is easy to use and gives scored feedback and also the ability to provide auto-driven CME Certificates in PDF format. The site has three sections which are kept reasonably separate - medical CME, nursing CNE and physiotherapy CPE. The boundaries can be "crossed" and I admit I found the case for the physiotherapists on sacroiliac injury quite interesting.

While the list of CME topics is not comprehensive, there has been a lot of support from ACC and this can be very useful for some of those elusive topics such as spondylolisthesis, low back injury and sacroiliac sprain.

Having gone through a couple of the quizzes, I was surprised just how easy to use the format was. Certainly a number of the quizzes require some lengthy reading in preparation, but one can opt to "ride the quiz bareback" and still qualify for the CME certificate at the end.

Perhaps in 2009 the Club might even want to investigate the possibility of integrating the certificates/points with the online MOPS points service run by the RNZCGP. From my point of view I found the highly non-threatening "Quiz and Explanation" format excellent and highly educational. The scoring was also very forgiving with often more than one "correct" answer.

The background reading material is by and large available on hyper-links, whether it is a reference to a section from the ACC manual, a guest review article or an article in New Zealand Doctor.

The Goodfellow Unit claims to facilitate multidisciplinary learning, supply dedicated resources and work in collaborative partnerships (for example, with ACC, CMP Medica and University clinical departments).

This in turn enables the unit to assist a wide range of health professionals to gain new knowledge and skills to provide improved health outcomes via innovative and engaging interactive learning - access to case studies, quizzes and other resources, and content developed and updated by relevant practitioners in the fields of medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, pharmacy, and audiology.

Around the time the website was set up I was invited to a meeting at the unit's offices chaired by Dr McCormick. That was around the same time the New Zealand Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society (and CME activities in women's health issues including obstetrics and gynaecology) was devolving at a rapid rate, and a suggestion was made that some of the generous funding which remained under the auspices of that historically significant society could be well invested into the Goodfellow Unit's national CME programme. While this plea did not seem to quite translate into action, I feel there is certainly still excellent scope to add in a range of educational opportunities in women's health to the site.

Scant support for CME
While we are expected to know everything about everything in these days of Balkanised DHB services, I am sure our local area primary care network is not alone in having received scant if any CME support from the secondary care sector over the best part of the last decade.

Coincidentally - and rather prophetically perhaps - the Ministry of Health (after having successfully extricated itself from any vestige of involvement over the last 15 years) wants GPs to "become" more involved in maternity care again. The ability to automatically generate CME certificates and to provide good quality CME activity gives the unit and the Club a great scope for adding in various primary care specialties (such as obstetrics and gynaecology) as time goes by.

The Goodfellow Club site also has linkages back to the Goodfellow Unit, with such additional free CME resources as the full proceedings (in Power Point format) from the excellent April 2008 Goodfellow Symposium in Auckland, and links to the Cochrane database PEARLS (Practical Evidence About Real-life Situations) - otherwise known as "succinct summaries of systematic reviews from the Cochrane Collaboration".

I would recommend this site be re-visited by all New Zealand GPs. Spend 30 minutes having a look around - it is well worth the effort.

OUT OF FIVE STARS
High quality content *****
Up to date ****
Good presentation  *****
Level of unfettered access *****
Useful patient information ***
Interactive CME *****

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