The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2006 recommendations on HIV screening are well accepted by the target populations. Further work at explaining the risk of HIV infection to ED patients should be undertaken and may boost the acceptance rate of ED HIV screening.

IntroductionFree open-access medical education (FOAM) is a collection of interactive online medical education resources—free and accessible to students, physicians and other learners. This novel approach to medical education has the potential to reach learners across the globe; however, the extent of its global uptake is unknown.MethodsThis descriptive report evaluates the 2016 web analytics data from a convenience sample of FOAM blogs and websites with a focus on emergency medicine (EM) and critical care. The number of times a site was accessed, or “sessions”, was categorized by country of access, cross-referenced with World Bank data for population and income level, and then analyzed using simple descriptive statistics and geographic mapping.ResultsWe analyzed 12 FOAM blogs published from six countries, with a total reported volume of approximately 18.7 million sessions worldwide in 2016. High-income countries accounted for 73.7% of population-weighted FOAM blog and website sessions in 2016, while upper-middle income countries, lower-middle income countries and low-income countries accounted for 17.5%, 8.5% and 0.3%, respectively.ConclusionFOAM, while largely used in high-income countries, is used in low- and middle-income countries as well. The potential to provide free, online training resources for EM in places where formal training is limited is significant and thus is prime for further investigation.

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