On behalf of the METRIQ Study Team, thanks for the support that you have shown our work so far. As outlined on our Research Agenda page, the METRIQ Blog study has led to publications in Academic Emergency Medicine: Education and Training1 as well as Annals of Emergency Medicine.2 Those that participated in the blog study have been acknowledged in the latter study as collaborators (find your name on PubMed under the Collaborators tab) and will also be recognized on the two papers currently under review and the two papers that are currently being written.
With writing wrapping up on the blog study manuscripts, it is time for the METRIQ team to turn its eyes towards podcasts. While we had initially considered a quality appraisal study similar to the Blog study, after much internal debate and discussion we concluded that we simply didn’t know enough about how podcast listeners used podcasts to develop an evidence-informed study. Instead, we aim to answer that question:
How do you use podcasts?
While variations of this question have been answered in retrospective survey-based studies to various degrees,3–5 with the METRIQ Podcast study we are hoping to dig a bit deeper. It will consist of a brief (<10m) intake survey to gather demographics and information on your podcast use. Then over the course of a few months, we will ask you to listen to 8 specific podcasts that we have uploaded to our podcast study channel as you usually would. After each we’ll ask you to complete a very brief (<5m) survey asking detailed questions about how you are listening to that podcast. We are hoping that this pragmatic study will provide detailed prospectively collected data on how medical education podcasts are used in the real world.
Learning from our previous work, we have recruited an international team of investigators from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa and expanded recruitment beyond physicians to include allied health professionals such as nurses and paramedics. Further, to facilitate the participation of Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC) we have incorporated the use of both email and WhatsApp into our study design.
Enroll in the METRIQ Podcast Study!
Thank you for considering participation. With your help, we hope to continue to improve the credibility and quality of medical education podcasts.
Click here to complete the intake form