Communications Committee Update

Communication is the action of exchanging information and ideas. It is a give and take. It is a part of our everyday lives…in the everyday interactions we have with our families, friends, co-workers, patients and their families. Communication is a two-way street and relies on a free-flowing give and take of ideas. We have honed our conversation skills over many years, starting in infancy, before we could even talk, continuing into through our childhood, adolescence and adulthood. We have all become very adept at reading, writing, and talking…all conventional means of communicating ideas.

Social media is a relatively new communication tool that is increasingly ubiquitous in our society. Social media doesn’t exist on any specific platform, rather it exists in an expression of exchanging information. Social media exists in the give and take. It is not the publication of a formal research paper in a peer-reviewed journal, it is the communication of the ideas in the paper, or commentary about those ideas, or discussions about those ideas in your lives or the lives of your patients, or a thousand other things that derive from those ideas in that paper. Social media exists in the exchange of ideas. The back and forth. And SOCCA is building on this. The back and forth between its leadership and its members, between its senior members and its junior members, between its active members and in-training members, between every different permutation of person in our Society. The back and forth of information and ideas.

To help facilitate this back and forth…this exchanging of ideas, the Communication Committee will, at the upcoming 2019 SOCCA Annual Meeting and Critical Care Update, launch three new social media hashtags around the three strategic goals for 2018-2020 (in addition to the #SOCCA19 hashtag for all our SOCCA Annual Meeting events:

• #SOCCATrainees = to highlight fellow, resident and student activities
• #SOCCADiversity = to highlight diversity in our membership
• #SOCCAResearch = to highlight important research conducted by our members

The Communication Committee, in combination with the SOCCA Board of Directors, challenge each of you to do four things at the upcoming 2019 SOCCA Annual Meeting:

1. Register for a Twitter account (kudos to you if you’ve already done this!)
2. Follow SOCCA (@SOCCA_CritCare) (kudos to you if you’ve already done this too!)
3. Capture (through words or images) three moments at the 2019 SOCCA Annual Meeting that highlight the three new hashtags for this meeting #SOCCATrainees, #SOCCADiversity, and #SOCCAResearch
4. Re-tweet (with or without comments) at least 1 of these moments from another SOCCA member, thereby facilitating communication of ideas and moments.

This simple 4-step challenge is designed to promoting communication…the give and take between our members. Who knows, maybe your next collaboration can come from a simple re-tweet of something you find interesting…

Author

Kevin W. Hatton, MD, FCCM

Chair, Committee on Communications
Editor, SOCCA Interchange

Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Surgery

University of Kentucky College of Medicine

Lexington, Kentucky