The development of the site

This site has been built for altruistic reasons only, as a resource for medical education. 

I worked as a GP in Workington, Cumbria 2006-2016 and was Lead Training Programme Director ofEast Cumbria Vocational Training Scheme between 2005 and 2011. I don’t have any formal IT training.

This site started out in 1992 as www.wellclosesquare.co.uk, in the era of windows 3.1. We were about to get a network in the practice and I was looking for a way to share medical information around the doctors in the practice via a static intranet. I looked at various ways of doing this including windows 3.1 help files, but nothing really met my needs. I really almost stumbled across html – the web was in its infancy. It looked like a simple way to share information, with all the formatting done “on the fly”.

I started to build the intranet, but the practice network was delayed by a year or more. I was left with a medical information system which I used on a daily basis and found really useful, so it seemed a good idea to put the information out onto the web for others to use. In those days of dial-up, I also provided a CD-ROM, which was given to all new trainers in the Northern Deanery.

This was all, by chance, rather ahead of its time, and essentially I cornered the “GP education market” as far as the web was concerned – there was nothing quite like it anywhere else. The site has become well known internationally, and is regularly used by the medical educators and doctors in training. Initially, most of the content was derived from me, but as the years have gone by others have offered contributions. Some of the content is the notes from my teaching and learning. A lot of the content is in note form which is intelligible to those to whom the site is targeted but may not make much sense to the layman. I recently discovered that the site was one of the first 400 websites on the world wide web!

Initially I coded the HTML by hand on a Commodore Amiga, then FrontPage, though I now use Dreamweaver.  It is now owned by Dr Ramesh Mehay (an experienced web designer, GP, GP Trainer and former Training Programme Director) who has transferred it through to a WordPress platform.

The target audience is

1. GP Trainers
2. Medical educators
3. GPs in training
4. Other Educationalists who may find the content interesting and see what we do in medicine – to see if there is transferable knowledge and skills (which I am sure there are)/

The website now functions as an archive of mostly information that is timeless.  Please be aware that some of the content – particularly clinical knowledge and management – may be out of date and the user should cross-reference to more up to date and reliable sites and sources.  This responsibility lies with the user.  The authors/owners of this website cannot take any responsibility for this.  We are purely providing this information for altruistic reasons.  This website is provided for information only. No claims are made of accuracy or validity, and no responsibility will be taken by the authors or owners for events arising from the use of the information provided. Educators, trainees, patients or any person in general should not use this website or information on it as a substitute for consulting a doctor.

To give any feedback or anything else on this site, please contact rameshmehay@googlemail.com