Introduction: Videos can turn into valuable teaching tools and YouTube has proven to be the best platform to disseminate this information. It was created in February 2005 and since then, there has been a rapid expansion of YouTube videos on several subjects, nowadays there are over 800 million unique users every month. Neurosurgery is not out of this wave, and several channels related to it can be found at YouTube.
Methods: We reviewed the main articles evaluating educational videos related to medicine, including some scarce material evaluating specifically neurosurgical videos.
We also point pros and cons of this new technology and foster a deeper discussion. In addition, we simply explain how to create a channel.
Results: A very low percentage of videos can be considered as good quality ones. Usually institutional videos are of better quality, however, there is too little material of that kind, specially regarding neurosurgery.
Conclusions: We found that the viewer should be careful and choose wisely which channels and videos to watch. We also found that there is a lack of institutional videos, which comprise a higher degree of video quality in terms of reliability. Besides that, there is a huge opportunity to increase the availability of neurological surgery videos, in order to lower the cost of education and training, increase the efficacy, which is specially important in developing countries.
Patient Care: Improving education efficacy has is one tip of the line, it has broad impact, but requires a longer time of adaptation. Once we find the right and more efficient way to use new technologies, knowledge can be spread and learned faster and easier.
Learning Objectives: By the conclusion of this session, participants should be able to: 1) Understand that, because of its ease of use and popularity, YouTube is the platform for dissemination of educational videos. 2) Understand that there is not enough good quality neurosurgical videos on YouTube. 3) Discuss about the theme, and know the importance of this tool in modern learning.
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