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Let's hope I can get this clicker working. Uh, thank you so much for having us here today. Um, my name is Phil. Michael May and I am, uh, the CEO and founder at medal. And, um, and it's a real honor to be here. We absolutely love, um, hosting a wonderful events like gas talk. Why do we Why do we Why do we like hosting events like gassy? Because it's really important. Um, we need to train 18 million more healthcare professionals by 2030 is what the World Health Organization has explained in its future of medical education report. But the Lancet explains that that we face grave deficiencies in our healthcare training capacity. It takes 15 years and $700,000 to train doctors in certain countries around the world and with severe institutional shortages and the requirement to train a third more healthcare professionals on planet Earth By 2030 we have a toxic combination. What's worse is that in the medical education report from the W. H. O on the continent of Africa, where resources are there, least the need is at its greatest. And there are 11 countries on the continent of Africa, which do not have a single medical school and over 20 that only have one medical school. But it's not a problem that's confined to other parts of the world. And in the last number of months in the UK, we have seen headlines on BBC News saying the NHS in England is facing its worst staffing crisis in history. It's something that's actually quite close to home. This is the paper from the Association for Surgeons and Training in Great Britain and Ireland. And it points out the cost of surgical training to the individual surgical trainee of up to 1300 lbs per year on courses and conferences, much on course fees, and travel up to 74,000 lbs for an individual trainee in oral maxillofacial surgery over the course of their training, with an average of about 23,000 lbs. And with the buying power of medical salaries in the UK decreasing over the last 10 years, this is a conservative estimate. If you are paying attention to what the British Medical Association are saying about the buying power of doctor salaries in the UK at the moment, we have a really toxic combination here to cost of training is rising, Buying power of salaries is decreasing, and most of that training cost is born by the individual training. This is a quote shared by, uh, Maria Prial on Twitter. And how does that affect individuals? This is what Maria has said as a widening participation doctor. Money isn't always has been tight. Study budget covers one big course or maybe 2 to 3 small ones. And to meet course surgical training needs. The wealthy can easily treat the application as a page kickbox exercise. And for us, we do not think this should be the case. We really want to make healthcare training accessible, but to meet some of the big goals for planet Earth, we need to do that at scale, and that requires immense collaboration and a little bit of creativity. And that's what we want to do. That metal. When we looked at high healthcare organizations were running. Teaching course is conferences, events. We looked at that process and we saw a very typical thing happening. We saw organizations setting up an eventbrite. We saw people being bounced to zoom. We saw Google forms being pasted in a chatterbox. We inevitably saw someone in an office called Steve who was copying and pasting names from a Google sheets into Microsoft Word certificate template, saving them as individual pdf and e mailing them to to her people. Per course. We then saw a video being downloaded from Zoom being added to YouTube video and, in the description, another Google form description being used for a feedback form with no guarantee the person has actually ever watched catch up or on demand for that individual teaching course and conference. And on average, it was taking about 1 to 2 hours of admin per teaching course for an organization to set all of that up. Most of it was being born by individual clinicians above and beyond all of their clinical work. We don't have enough clinicians as it is. Never mind us doing all of that crap. And so we tried to automate it from end to end registration right through the on demand so that busy clinicians could teach and train. We fight all of the administration. If we could solve a simple problem for people who are organizing courses and conferences, perhaps we can encourage them to come with us in this journey and to share that teaching and training around the world. This is something that Doctor Tedros said at a tech conference in 2020 ask yourself every day if your technology works to help the poorest in the world and to reduce inequalities. We didn't want to just solve an administration problem. We wanted to solve the problem. That was really big. We need to train 18 million more healthcare professionals. We wanted to bring people with us on that journey. So we started to think creatively about the technology as well. Why should zoom licenses limit the number of people that we teach and train? Why should we be limited to the 1 to 300 people? Of course. Our conference. We lifted the lid so that you could host 10,000 people on an individual medal event. We tried to innovate in our business model. We're not a charity we our company, but we really care about what we're doing. We try to be innovative in our business model. So for free courses and conferences, we were determined. If it's free and open access, we will provide our technology free and open access, and we'll only ever charge if it's a paid for event. But even then, um, we wanted to innovate because we know that so many courses in conferences you wanted and needed to charge for the event they have offices. They've got team members they need to pay. Those are important things we wanted to interview in that space to, and we devised a program called Fair Medical Education so that if organizations are charging for an event, they can automatically welcome colleagues from around the world and lower middle income countries at a free or reduced cost. They don't need to even worry about the admin of that. The technology does it for them. And gas would have done that with this conference, and I absolutely love it. Did you see that map people attending from 50 countries around the world with us here today, all via the fair medical education scheme. But life isn't a magic bullet. We've heard about all of the challenges in law resource settings and actually in high resource settings. If you just come from Ireland like me, I don't have a great Internet connection in the place where I I live, and so actually being able to watch on demand is really important. And so that's something that we've. We've been really passionate about it metal, actually, when it's when it's a live event, being able to automatically as the organization share that on demand for people who need to watch at a time. And, more importantly, an Internet connection that suits them is actually really key. What does that look like? In the last 18 months, we've helped 1600 organizations, run 5.5 1000 courses and welcomed colleagues at 100 from 171 countries, hundreds of thousands of times online. But does it actually worked? Is online education actually work? This is a study from my test for a very one of the senior authors. Is David, not? Um It's a study which compared online basic surgical skills, courses versus face to face basic basic surgical skills courses. I'm a surgeon by training. If you told me this a few years ago that this was possible, I wouldn't have believed you. We were not involved with this study, other than being told we were name checked and after it was published. But this is something that's Matthias and his colleagues actually said there was no significant difference. Incompetency ratings of delegates receiving. They're online teaching versus face to face teaching and then the discussion section. They go on to say online teaching of surgical skills for early years is an appropriate alternative face to face training mechanism. Not only that, but in that paper they actually discussed one single course on how they were able to teach 553 surgeons across 20 countries in a single day. And they go on to say that this sort of technology has the ability to scale up the amount of teaching and training that we can provide as a medical community and an individual impact. This is something that someone else has said about being able to attend flexibly online. It's a nurse who's actually attended from a wonderful organization called Learn with Nurses who ran a number of webinars on med on. This has done nurse who who actually spotted the signs of cardiovascular disease in a patient, having not really received training in that before and actually got that patient care in the emergency department as a direct result of that open access education going to leave you with one last story as you'll see when you're signing up for this event. We actually verify people when they're joining an event on metal. As a health care professional, it means that you can make your event completely open access, but that it's safe that this is a welcoming professional community that you're joining. It's going to be a safe event in a single day. In the spring of this year, we had high tens, if not into the hundreds of people reach out just to say, I can't verify myself and see who you saw on the screen earlier on. Actually reached out to a couple of those people to find out. Why can you verify yourself? It's unusual that we get a bulk of people in a short space of time. Asking that and the response we got was pretty consistent. I don't have access to my institutional email address at the moment, and I don't have a copy of Photo I. D or a letter from my department to say that I can access these events because I didn't think it was important when I fled the country to get that thanks very much and quite rightly so. What? What happened was an NGO in London had actually picked up our product without even telling us without us knowing about it. Had recruited 250 UK doctors to teach to teach them to train Ukrainian medical students virtually every single day, seven days, seven times a day for two months. They taught 2000 Ukrainian medical students virtually, and they replaced the online medical curriculum for Ukraine during the war, and they were using metal to help them do that. It was a crisis rescue foundation, and they did an absolutely incredible job and just goes to show the power of collaboration When, when we can make it happen, they weren't doing that some sort of imperialistic thing where you pay doctors teach Ukraine medical students They were actually trying to free up clinicians on the ground instead of having to provide face to face, uh, medical education to provide face to face patient care and actually bolster the medical resources in that country. Really impressive work. And this is a quote from Ukraine Medical School professor. As a result, thank you for everything you're doing for Cipro and all the people who are trapped in this situation. When we work together, we really can have an impact. We need to train 18 million healthcare professionals by 2030. We firmly believe that metal, that our role is to simply enable and impart other healthcare organizations to make that happen. Thank you so much for having us here today. And I hope you have a really wonderful rest of your conference huge thank you to fill for the work he's doing. He has helped empower this conference and actually our previous conferences. So it's been a pleasure to work with him. Um, in view of time, we're going to just move to our next speaker. Who is Professor Mark Shrine? Um, if you have any questions for Phil, please do write them in the middle chat, and we get to them at the end. So I think what we'll do is we'll move on to questions for Phil now who is behind the scenes. But it's going to pop up now. We can see if we can have a question. I'm just I'm just going to check. This is working. Can you hear me on this mic? You can hear me and it would be great to get a question from the floor for Phil. Um, so have a think and I'll get will to bring the microphone to somebody. But I'll ask you a question while you're all thinking so fill really, really interesting to hear about your work. And obviously, you've been a huge part of the the gas that conference this weekend. I'm just wondering, um, what are your sort of dreams for the future of medal? What are the next steps? What are you most excited about happening? It's a really good question. We we try to we try to put numbers on it. Um, we were really gunning for impact, and you were really transparent with that. So you can actually read more about metal dot org slash mission. Um, actually outlines numerically what we're going for, um, and we plan to have the capacity to train four million healthcare professionals by 2027 is where were where were gunning for actually placing a number on it. Um, and the most important part of that is that it's not all about us, right? So we're really, really clear about that. We see our role as enabling and empowering and nothing more than that. Um, I don't think we should be more than that. We can provide the tech. We can provide the support. We've done thousands of events. We know them inside out. But you guys are the people who know medicine and surgery inside out. And our role is to enable and empower that I'm a medic. I'm a medic. But I'm only one person, and we've got a system and support that hopefully enables a community of people to deliver teaching and training. So we're really transparent by 2027 we want to see four million people, um, trains, um, using using metal. Um, and we're really clear that we want to see 75% of high income country courses and conferences made available to colleagues in lower middle income settings. And that's one of the real benefits that we've seen from the last two years. People have been welcomed to are courses and conferences like never before, and actually, it's not new tech. It's not groundbreaking tech. But what has happened is that we suddenly realized that we can do it. And over the last couple of years, we've welcomed people from 100 and 71 countries. And we can continue to do that. It's not. It's actually not that expensive either, um, to do it, and you can find frugal ways to do things. Um, but more importantly, it means that those people can continue to join, um, and have education. Of course. His conferences accessible to them. We'd love to see 75% of course, is a conference in high income countries made available to colleagues in low and middle income settings. Thank you so much. That's really exciting to be some of the numbers towards that big one. So I've got someone in the crowd who wants to ask a question. Yeah. Great. Hey, thanks for your awesome talk. I really, really, uh, very inspiring. Uh, I was wondering, actually. How did you start? Where did you start? And how did you find your resources to start? That's a really good question. Um, we started in the wrong place. Um, is the honest answer we started thinking, Actually, the way to do this is to start budget building digital assessments, and we started building digital assessments on metal to help colleagues around the world assess each other so that we could build like like, best practice medical education assessments and very quickly realized that without the actual learning, there's not much point in doing the assessing. And we also looked at where the need really was, and the need was really access to the education, not the assessment. And and honestly, I was pretty close to giving up. So in, um, I remember distinctly going for a walk on a long beach with my wife in January 2020 and I just said, I can't be bothered with this anymore. This is too much hard work and we're not seeing the growth. We're just not seeing the uptake and we're focused on assessments and and as cove, it kind of hit. It's kind of changed the game overnight. We just saw adoption of accessible education, and it really changed the game. But not only that, we saw adoption from the places where we needed to get the resources to make this happen. The technology you see in front of it is expensive to build a really expensive thing to do, and and so you need resources to do that. But what we found was that in the tech community at the start of coated suddenly healthcare Healthcare was never sexy, right in tech healthcare was never sexy. It's not dating app or it's not a new way to kind of move my money. Places like those are the things that are sexy to the tech community. Healthcare was never sexy. We were seen as the community that were really slow to adopt things and kind of lost cause honestly and covered, kind of showing a light on that where in March and April 2020 the only people who were kind of getting investment from the tech community health because suddenly people realized, Actually, this is really important. Healthcare is kind of important and and we were kind of in the right place at the right time, where we had the mission of what we wanted to do, that aligned with what the tech community was saying actually was important. And we we closed around of investment in, um in the middle of the pandemic when that just wasn't happening, and we not only did that with, um, uh, some investors, but we did it with some of the best tech investors in Europe and the us we had, um, the CEO of a company called Next Door, which is a multi billion dollar company, is one of the biggest social networks in the US Um, with the CEO of that company kind of back up from day one of her brothers and anesthetist in Scotland. She lives in San Francisco. She's also on the board of Slack was Jack Dorsey, CFO, and from day one, she said, I believe in this. It's so important. Um, and we got the backing of a VC called seed camp Who, um, if you Google kind of top seed investors in the UK and Europe Seed camp is number one. Um, they've backed Hoppin. They've backed Transferwise. They've backed all of the big tech names that you've heard of suddenly said, Health care is important. So so that's where the resources came from. And actually, I think that's the right thing to do. We've got the right expertise, we've got tech expertise, we've got the right resources, we got the right medical minds and we've got the right community and healthcare to make this stuff happen. So in the next five years, we have amazing opportunity to change the face and accessible education. Great. Thank you so much. I think we've got time for one last short question. Um, there are a few hands sort of going up. Well, I don't know if you want to. How do I How do I pick? I'm going to go there. Thank you. Um, first and foremost, my name is Tom. I'm from Kenya. So medal has enabled me to be here, so thank you for that. So my my question, my question is developing the whole platform metal. Um, I think it's a It's an important thing for healthcare to be involved in intervention beyond just clinical skills. And this is really like a business that you you've established. Um, what are the challenges that you had in establishing a business? And also now, for the broader healthcare? Is there anything metal is doing to try and provide non clinical skills like now business development and and that kind of stuff for upcoming healthcare professionals? It's a really great question. Um, I think it's really important. I actually stepped out. So I was I was a surgical registrar. Cardiac surgery before jumping into middle in between times. I actually jumped out and and work. GSK was a global medical director of GSK. A little bit of time, and that was a really formative time for me. Why? Because they put me through some Harvard business school teaching and training, and and it showed me kind of skill set that I hadn't got, Um and and, um, it was it was really, really formative. Um uh, from a from a medical perspective, I think that's really important is how we innovate. Actually bringing skills together is how we innovate in an echo chamber. We don't innovate, and we can't be afraid of change. We have to embrace, change and and and think about how we can do things differently. And that comes from new ideas coming from other places. Um, we have tried to lean into that in terms of the events that we part on metal. Last week, we part of it an event. A national NHS conference which had the minister of health speaking at it had leaders of political parties, uh, speaking at it, and it had healthcare workers, um, joining in the room and hundreds online, and actually, despite it being a U. K event, we had colleagues from 20 countries. Joining, um uh, come in here. Leaders of political parties from the UK and, um, and managers and actually business people from within the NHS. In some ways, um, I think it's really important. And it's not just clinical skills. I think some of those softer things are really important as we kind of develop in in medicine. So, yeah, there's a whole breadth of stuff on there, and we're really passionate that this can't just be how to sit here. And it can't just be how to treat a heart attack. Um, it has to be, you know, how do we How do we change the face of medicines and skills are really important. Knowledge is really important. Innovation is really important. So we tried. We tried to empower as much of that as we possibly can. Fantastic. There's been some really insightful questions, so thank you so much, Phil. Not only for your talk, but also, um, just for the incredible tech support and enablement of this conference. And with so many of you around the world tuning in, so, um