MedPod Learn

Making FOAMed Stick

I’ve spent more than a decade with one foot in clinical practice and the other firmly in FOAMed.
St Emlyn’s has been one of my professional homes in that time—part teaching space, part experiment, part confessional booth for anyone who’s ever tried to practise emergency medicine in a corridor.

We’ve had great conversations, recorded countless episodes, and occasionally managed to sound wiser than we really are.

But I kept wondering: did any of it actually stick?

Not because the ideas weren’t good, but because real life gets in the way. You listen to a brilliant episode on your commute—trauma, ECGs, human factors, whatever—and think, I must remember that. Two days later it’s gone, buried under nights, rota changes, and a hunt for the missing ultrasound gel.

Then appraisal season arrives and the “evidence of learning” box stares back at you. You’ve learned endlessly, just not in a way the system recognises.

At some point I had to admit: if even I couldn’t remember what we’d said on St Emlyn’s, what hope did anyone else have?

The idea: give podcasts a memory

I wanted something simple: a way for podcast listening to turn into structured, trackable learning without ruining the joy of FOAMed.

That eventually became MedPod Learn – a podcast-powered education platform built for time-pressured clinicians who learn on the move.

Open the app and nothing dramatic happens (deliberately). It looks like a normal podcast player, because that’s what most of us want. But tap on an episode and you get:

• a sharp episode summary
• focused learning points
• exam-style SBAs/MCQs that actually feel like they belong in a real exam
• a reflection prompt that treats you like a grown adult

You listen as you always have. Afterwards, if you choose, you check whether anything stuck. And the app quietly keeps a record of what you’ve done.

That light, optional scaffolding is what turns a commute into revision and a dog walk into CPD.

The messy bit: how we got there

Getting from “idea” to “working app” was not elegant.

My first attempt was to redesign the St Emlyn’s website. I hired a UK web company, paid them more than I care to admit, and got something that looked nicer but solved precisely none of my problems.

Then, via the usual FOAMed chain of “someone who knows someone”, I was introduced to NerdzLab, a development team in western Ukraine. I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I got was a calm, organised, relentlessly professional group of people who just kept shipping code while their country was at war. They never once played that card. They simply turned up and did the work. It was quietly humbling.

Along the way I learned Python—the messy, command-prompt, why-won’t-this-environment-activate kind. I wrestled with the Google Play Console and Apple’s App Store, both apparently designed to test one’s psychological resilience. I even learned how to trademark a name, which had never featured on my career plan.

All of that for one deceptively simple goal: make it easy for podcasts to count as learning.

What MedPod actually does

At its core, MedPod Learn is a free, curated FOAMed podcast player:

• thousands of episodes
• across dozens of trusted medical podcasts
• all searchable and playable in one place
• available on Apple and Android

If that’s all you ever use, fine. It’s meant to be useful even in its simplest form.

Beyond that, you can switch on the tools that give your listening some structure:

• episode notes and key learning points
• exam-quality MCQs/SBAs sitting directly under the audio
• mapped outcomes and consolidated learning logs
• meaningful reflection prompts that make sense in real clinical practice

It’s ideal for:

• students and trainees revising in the gaps between everything else
• exam candidates who live on podcasts
• senior clinicians trying to turn “I heard this on a podcast” into something they can actually show at appraisal

FOAMed is fast-moving, contemporary, and often more up to date than the textbooks we swear we’ll read. MedPod Learn doesn’t tame that energy; it just gives it a spine.

Everything beyond the basic player is optional, and in low- and middle-income countries the subscription price for those extra tools is set as low as the App Stores will allow. FOAMed should remain open; anything built around it should honour that.

What MedPod Learn is not trying to do

MedPod Learn won’t fix emergency medicine. It won’t solve rota gaps, overcrowded departments, or disappearing ultrasound gel.

What it does do is solve one small, stubborn pinch point: the awkward gap between learning from podcasts and recording that learning as CPD.

We’re already learning in stolen moments. Those moments deserve to count.

MedPod Learn is now available on iOS and Android with a month’s free trial. If podcasts are already part of how you keep up to date, this might finally give you a simple way to show it.