An invisible knife to add to your toolkit: a narrative review of how podcasts have audibly shaped, styled, and sharpened surgical education

Abstract

Podcasts as a mobile learning platform to augment surgical expertise and dialogue have been embraced by many surgical educators and learners. Podcasts are digital audio files that can be streamed or downloaded from the internet to individual devices. Surgical podcast literature was appraised with a search using the keywords 'surgery' AND 'podcast' in the PubMed database which found 639 results with titles and abstracts screened to identify and review 28 relevant articles. This narrative review explores podcast origins, aims, structure and availability for diverse surgical audiences. It also appraises quality, strengths and limitations, highlighting optimal surgical podcast features. Finally, it proposes how to better implement podcasts into surgical training and clinical practice.

Keywords: surgical education; surgical podcast.