The REEME project: a cooperative model for sharing international medical education materials

Although the Internet has become an excellent source of medical education materials, in many specialties, including Emergency Medicine (EM), most of the information is in English. Few international EM practitioners can attend costly specialty conferences, importing foreign experts to teach at these conferences is costly and, even then, these experts are available for a limited time to relatively few people. Countries with minimal health care or medical education budgets find providing even basic materials for professional medical education difficult. An exciting international project now freely distributes Spanish language educational programs to health care professionals on topics relating to EM. The Recursos Educacionales en Español para Medicina de Emergencia (REEME; Educational Resources in Spanish for EM) Project (www.reeme.arizona.edu) was developed to overcome some of these problems by providing language-specific specialty information and widespread international availability, and by promoting international cooperation among professional health care educators. It also provides a ready source of Spanish medical vocabulary for those trying to learn the language. With computer support from the University of Arizona's Learning and Technology Center, REEME first went "live" on November 1, 2004. Three years later, as of November 1, 2007, the site had 575 programs from 411 donors representing 19 countries and the United Nations. There are currently about 645 downloads per month to users in 73 countries. The REEME Project demonstrates the power of the Internet as a means to achieve international cooperation in medical education, and can serve as a model for similar projects in other specialties and languages.