Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast. My name is Tom and welcome to this special bonus episode.

Now that we finish the complete series on surgery, which is a huge milestone,

I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about the journey of creating zero to finals up to

this point and where zero to finals is headed in the future.

Maybe this is interesting to you.

If it's not interesting to you, don't worry.

We'll be back with the regular podcasts and starting a series on obstetrics and gynecology very soon.

But I thought this would be a nice opportunity

between finishing the surgery podcasts and starting the obstetrics and gynaecology podcast to talk a little

bit about the story of zero to finals. I started zero to finals in 2016 after I finished foundation

training. It's something I'd been desperate to do during foundation training, but there simply isn't much free time when you're doing a busy on-call rotor to get something like this off the ground.

And I was trying to start zero to finals during foundation training, just working at the weekends and in the evenings, but it was very difficult to make any progress.

So I took some time out and set to work putting together some very, very basic notes

on topics in medicine and surgery. After about three to four months of work on this, I had some

very basic notes which were pretty rubbish, to be honest, but I was able to get a website

up and running and get some content out there, although at this point nobody used it at all.

Then I started GP training in 2017 and I rotated through paedrics and obstetrics and gynecology.

And at this point I started putting together some basic notes on obstetrics and gynaecology and pediatrics.

But still, very few people, maybe a few people per week, were using the content.

Then in 2018, I decided it was time to turn the basic notes I'd put together into something more comprehensive

that could seriously be used as a resource for preparing for exams. And that's when I started

writing the medicine book, converting the basic medicine notes that I had into something a bit more

...