Endocrine Abstracts

In March 2020, the world went into covid lockdown. Students, trainees and consultants were all called to the front-line, working additional and highly stressful shifts. Amongst the numerous negative consequences of the pandemic, teaching fell by the wayside. All conferences and educational meetings were cancelled. Initially there seemed no time or mechanism to continue teaching. However, on the 27th April 2020, one month into the first lockdown, I presented the first ‘Alex’s Osteoblast’ webinar on Zoom to several hundred endocrinologists and trainees around the world, mentally and physically exhausted from the hardest working experience of their lives, but eager to interact once again and learn. In this interactive teaching webinar, I discussed common queries related to Endocrine Bone disorders. There was exceptional engagement from the endocrine community and feedback was so positive that I decided to continue giving these webinars on different subtopics every few weeks. I drew up a comprehensive list of the most common clinical queries and systematically tackled each one in a practical, interactive and evidence-based webinar. So far there have been eleven free-to-view full episodes of ‘Alex’s Osteoblast’ since the pandemic began. I have received positive feedback that these webinars have significantly improved the bone expertise of our international community and made bone endocrinology ‘sexy’ again. Here, I will discuss the concepts of this webinar series during covid, as well as other activities including setting up Endocrine Bone Teaching Clinics, Endocrine Careers Evenings and my wider roles as Head of Academic Tutoring improving study techniques for the next generation of doctors.