Communication Committee Update

With two months of 2020 already behind us, the Communication Committee is collaborating with the Board of Directors and SOCCA’s other committees to create a unified communication strategy moving forward. This is an exciting time for SOCCA: membership is on the rise, the inaugural SOCCA board review course is forthcoming in conjunction with the Annual Meeting, and a clinical trials group is beginning to coalesce. SOCCA’s committees are working to develop online resources for members, including coronavirus preparedness materials and (coming soon) leadership development reading. Meanwhile, members are engaged in impactful clinical, research, leadership, and educational activities on a large scale. The Communication Committee’s focus must shift to not only inform the membership of SOCCA happenings but also amplify both the ways in which SOCCA provides value to its members and the accomplishments of its membership. To that end, the committee is developing a two-pronged approach to information dissemination relying both on regularly scheduled content releases across multiple platforms and a distributed model for the curation of ad-hoc announcements.

This issue of Interchange again highlights topics that are of interest to the membership, including both developments internal to the Society and the perspectives of members on both emerging and established challenges for clinicians and patients alike. Emerging infectious threats, namely Candida auris and coronavirus disease 2019 (i.e., 2019 novel coronavirus), share certain commonalities, such as the heightened potential for nosocomial transmission and the need for screening and facility-specific contingency planning. Professional society trade publications, like Interchange, have historically offered a timelier mechanism to disseminate information compared to traditional biomedical publications, such as major journals. As publishers of major journals evolve to remain relevant amidst an increasingly competitive landscape while meeting the ever-growing demands of an information-hungry and connected medical readership, Interchange will likewise need to evolve. Accordingly, we anticipate Interchange gradually shifting toward a timely online blog format with quarterly aggregation into our traditional newsletter format.

On a strongly related note, the Communication Committee is currently seeking Society members who are interested in contributing by joining the committee itself to develop an integrated communication strategy, authoring or curating content for Interchange, and/or helping to champion and amplify the Society and its membership through social media and other outlets. Ensuring that these efforts remain valuable, relevant, current, and representative of the membership’s diversity is of the utmost importance. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you are interested in contributing.

Author

Craig S. Jabaley, MD

Chair, SOCCA Committee on Communication

Assistant Professor, Department of Anesthesiology

Emory University

Atlanta, Georgia