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Hello. Uh my name is Phil Ulna and I'm really excited to share a little bit about what we're doing at Metal with you at the Gas O conference today. I'm so sorry that I can't be with you in person. But uh we love to hear from folks who are attend conference and please do reach out to us after if we can help in any way. My background is as a medical doctor and I head up the team here at Metal and we're deeply passionate about how do we make healthcare training more accessible for everyone? Why is that important? Well, as many of you will know, we need to train 18 million more healthcare professionals by 2030 but it takes 15 years and $700,000 to train a healthcare professional. And the lancet describe what we're facing as severe institutional shortages in our healthcare training capacity. So put short, we need to train one third more healthcare professionals on planet Earth whilst we don't have enough resources to train the doctors that we already have. And what's even worse is where that need is at. Its greatest resources are at their least there are 11 countries on the continent of Africa which do not have a single medical school. There are over 20 which only have one medical school for the entire nation. And you can see how that would pan through into postgraduate education as well, but it's not a problem confined to somewhere else in inverted commas. These are headlines from high income countries from around the world over the last 12 months. And you can see that even here in the UK, the NHS in England is facing its worst staffing crisis in history in the US. The physician shortage is only going to get worse. We have a problem but this slide illustrates how that that problem is accentuated by the cost of education to postgraduate trainees, at least here in the UK. On the top. Right, you'll see that the average spend for a postgraduate trainee on conferences alone is over 1300 lbs and 40% of of those trainees get zero recourse from their study budget resulting in 20 to 26,000 lbs being the average cost of er surgical training at least in the UK. With trainee spending up to 71,000 lbs of their own money to become a fully trained doctor. This is not acceptable. Why is it not acceptable? Well, in real terms, medics have had a pay cut over the last 10 to 15 years and that means that studying medicine may be confined to those who have the ability to pay. And Maria Prl from the widening participation. Medics Network describes this fairly, very eloquently. She said as a widening participation, doctor money isn't always has been tight and study budget can cover one big or maybe 2 to 3 small course sources. So to meet core surgical training needs, the wealthy can easily treat the application as a paid tick box exercise with little actual development. And we're deeply passionate that this is not how we should be training our healthcare professionals in the 21st century. It shouldn't be those who can afford to pay the most become the best doctors. We should be training the best and the brightest rather than those who can afford to pay the most. And so that's why we're so passionate about how do we make healthcare training accessible but not only how do we do it for one or two people, but how do we begin to do this at scale to really tackle that problem of 18 million more healthcare professionals? Many of you know what our mission is? Many of you have heard this before and I'm going to give you a little bit of an update about where we've been heading. We've built a platform that helps healthcare organizations run their teaching and training and to do it end to end. So we saw that typically organizations were setting up event bright bouncing people to a zoom, collecting Google form feedback, then ubiquitously, there's always this person in an office called Steve who copies er, feedback from the feedback form names and email addresses into Microsoft word certificate templates and email them out as PDF S to people. Then they download a video from Zoom because they've only got a gigabyte of storage. They add it to youtube or Vimeo and then they share that link, they also add a Google form link into the Vimeo or youtube video to make it available on demand. We've got 18 million more healthcare professional to train as planet earth. If we're going to do that, we're not going to do it like this. So what we've done at metal is just took that process and made it end to end so that organizations can speed up how they deliver teaching and training. But we've also built a community around medical education so that colleagues from around the world can actually find healthcare training courses, conferences and resources in a single place because part of this is about accessibility and visibility and what what else are we doing in that space? Well, this phrase from Doctor Ted Ross inspired us as a team. He said to ask yourself every day if your technology works to help the poorest in the world and to reduce inequalities. And one of the other things that we've done and begun to grow is what we've called the Fair Medical Education Scheme. It helps organizations, wonderful organizations like Gas Oc whose logo you will see on the screen here, participate in this scheme to offer uh free or significantly reduced cost tickets to colleagues in lower middle-income countries and our software will do all of the automated checks on those attendees to offer those tickets. This scheme has now been taken up by the Royal College of Surgeons of England, by the Association of Surgeons and Training the British orthopedic trainees association. The Society for Radio Training, it started to be to be used by Harvard and John Hopkins to begin to make some of their education accessible in lower middle income countries together as a community, we can really begin to move the needle in this space. This cannot all be about us, it has to be about a community. And so by making uh health care education accessible in a virtual way, we begin to break down barriers to education being available to colleagues who could otherwise never afford to travel. We know that live education is also not a magic bullet and being able to watch content available at a time. And importantly, an internet connection is important for colleagues around the world. And one really exciting thing that we're beginning to develop is accessible question banks. We know that uh being able to watch live content is really important. We know that being able to watch content on demand is really important. We also know that beginning to test uh knowledge and practice for exams is really important for trainees but is often made completely inaccessible by question banks costing thousands of pines. And we're actually making question banks much more accessible across a range of hundreds of global exams. From the US to the medical licensing assessment in the UK, to the multi specialty recruitment assessment in the UK to the MRC S. Um If you're interested in that as a healthcare professional or medical student, you can sign up for early access at med dot org slash keybank and, and we'll, we'll give you early access to exams. We've got U SME ready in early access at, at the moment. And we're currently working on a range of hundreds of exams to begin to scale up accessibility to testing for um medical professionals as well. And we're really excited about the impact that this can make on sharing knowledge internationally. Why is this all important? Well, we asked over 1000 medics on me all about how accessibility really affected them. These colleagues are all from lower middle income countries and we asked them um a number of questions, the responses blew us away. So 97% of those colleagues said that it was important or very important for them to access training courses in other countries. But 95% of those colleagues had felt excluded from international events due to the cost of travel. 95% said that they would be able to access that training if it had been available online. And 96 would have attended live if it had been available virtually. So we can see that we have the tools available to really begin to solve some of this problem. And whilst we love being face to face, I love a glass of wine. I love a cup of coffee. I love talking to people as much as the rest of us. Do. We also have the tools to begin to welcome colleagues from around the world who otherwise could possibly never be able to make it to our courses and conferences and an absolute hats off to gas ock today for making their events so accessible together, we can really make an impact on accessibility. I I just want to share some stories of the human impact of this type of, of work with you as well. Last year, we saw this type of comment coming up. Um Hundreds of times I can't verify myself and we find that um these were colleagues in Ukraine who couldn't access teaching and, and training and, and they had lost access to their institutional email addresses or their ID and we actually saw something very similar happen. Um Again, this year on Medal, I can't verify myself. And when our support team uh lead SU reached out to these people recently, we find that these were colleagues in Sudan who had started signing up to Medal um by, by the THS. Um And they, they didn't have access to institutional email addresses they didn't have copies of their ID cards and, and needed a manual process to help them verify themselves. And so has helped them uh to, to do that. Uh And what this has really hammered home for us is that um is that at a moment's notice, uh we can face a crisis in a country and, and we need to be able to scale up education to meet the needs of a country at a specific time. And uh this this happened, the the surgeon colleagues from Sudan reaching out actually happened as a result of social media. So um this is a tweet from a doctor in Sudan which I've used um uh translate to translate. But it said that Coursera does not have courses in the medical field. And that was tiring for me until two days ago, I found a site called Metal. It solved all my problems because now I don't just have courses and also a seat for online conferences. And she goes on to say they also have a scheme called Fair medical Education for poorer countries. And this helps you get free seats in international conferences, not all conferences and courses are free, but there are certain seats for free. So times that you can complete, she's talking about um we make these available for free for colleagues in lower middle income countries. In a single week. We had about 10% of Sudan's medics. Um sign up for fair medical education schemes and begin to start studying on, on metal. And this we reached out to and actually asked her about why is this important? And this is something that she said, she said in 2023 the war began in Khartoum. And not only did it result in the death of so many, but it also resulted in the displacement and migration of countless others. Now medics had to stop their education on lives once one more time, in addition, they had to leave behind their jobs, homes, books and belongings. This makes a challenge on our medical education even more difficult. It is now a luxury for every citizen to access education, let alone quality education, which has been lacking for many years. And we're passionate together as a medical community, we can begin to help colleagues like this. We have the technology to do it. All we need is the collective will power to make that education accessible and we need to train 18 million more healthcare professionals by 2030. That's not a luxury. That's a need that we face as planet earth. The only way that we're going to be able to do that is collectively with organizations like gas oc making their event available, making their event accessible. We stride to work alongside wonderful organizations like you. We do that um as um a humble community, we do that as a humble organization. We don't see this as all about us. We have to involve others. If you want to be involved, you can get involved. It's really easy to host an event, meal dot org slash host. Um, it's completely free if you're running an event. Um, if you're running a course in a conference, if your event is open access and it's free, our technology is free for you. The only time we ever charge is if you're taking payments for your events and we take a small fee, it's actually about half the price of event bright. That's the only time we ever charge those organizations. You can find an event if you're interested in learning medal dot org slash events. If you want to watch content on demand, you can do that at medal dot org slash on demand and maybe you want to teach and we'd really love you to join us as a teacher on meal. We've seen hundreds of medics volunteer to, to teach other medics in, particularly for colleagues who are in war torn countries or in er circumstances where medical education has been completely disrupted and you can join colleagues and teach as well meal dot org slash appeal. And we'll help you deliver education to hundreds of colleagues at a time and we'd be really grateful for you joining us on, on that mission. Thank you so much for letting me join you today and I hope you have a really wonderful rest of your country.