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EDUCATING HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS FOR A BETTER WORLD
EDUCATING HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS FOR A BETTER WORLD
A near-fatal dose of Cerebral Malaria in the Ivory Coast in 1998 put Dr Eoghan Colgan on a path to found Continulus, a healthcare EdTech platform making courses and lectures with world experts accessible, affordable, and inclusive for all healthcare professionals. He was a second-year medical student passionate to work as a humanitarian doctor and was seeking the experience he felt he would need.
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“All I wanted to do was to become a paediatrician and work for Médecins Sans Frontières, and I never managed either of those things”, he says. Ill-health persisted for several years after he got home, and he would be advised not to return to Africa “for a number of years”.
On that fateful trip, he also discovered a passion for music. “I was already an amateur guitarist and singer, but my brother gave me Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’ album on a cassette which would become my only comfort through the illness. I played that album on repeat and fell in love with it”, he recalls. He vowed to pursue music as far as he could, and following several years working as a junior doctor and gigging in his spare evenings, he was ‘discovered in London and left medicine for four years to ‘do music’. “I just didn’t want to regret not trying”.
The initial campaign began on 9th July 2021. When asked for a few of his highlights, he says: “playing in Hyde Park, Sir Tom Jones playing support act to me, and writing the soundtrack to Vanessa Kirby’s (recently Oscar-nominated actress) first movie. I’m also the wedding singer in her (Vanessa) first-ever on-screen appearance, but I doubt she remembers me!”.
In 2011, Eoghan left the music industry to get married and start a family with his now-wife, Gianna, and it was then his frustrations with Continuing Professional Development began. “I was catching up with my career, and I wanted to go to the big conferences, but they are costly, require time away from work and family, and they leave a huge carbon footprint. And if it was difficult for me, what about those in remoter communities and lower-resource countries?”
“Wouldn’t it be great for all healthcare professionals around the world to share an equal opportunity to learn from the leading experts in the world and access the latest recommended best-practice at a time, pace and place that suits them, in an environmentally friendly and socially responsible way?” he says.
So with a loan from his dad and a few credit cards, Eoghan built a healthcare EdTech platform that brings the world’s experts online fairly and equitably. All lectures are free, with a monthly subscription for premium features subsidised in middle-income countries and free in low-income countries. Plus, Continulus donates 4% of all sales to Médecins Sans Frontières, the organisation Eoghan had wanted to work for. “My brother worked for a year with MSF in Afghanistan, and I was so proud of him. So Continulus is a way for me to contribute to the humanitarian effort,” he explains.
Continulus is sharing access with healthcare professionals, hospitals, and national societies from 131 countries and is now using their expertise to build education solutions for others. “We started before the pandemic, so we have expertise in online learning. We’re helping to build online education programmes in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.”
