Bridging the gap between medical experts and patients š„ Dr. Gbemisola Boyede of Ask The Paediatricians
Episode at a glance:
GUEST: Dr. Gbemisola Boyede
COMMUNITY: Ask The Paediatricians
HOSTS: Bailey Richardson & Kevin Huynh
Show Notes
Today we're interviewing Dr. Gbemisola Boyede, the founder of "Ask The Paediatricians," an online medical education community that can offer all of us some much-needed inspiration in the time of COVID-19.
In Dr. Gbemi's home country of Nigeria, the child mortality rates are high. But what causes these deaths isn't a lack of cost-effective treatments for common diseases. It's a geographic and information gap between parents and practitioners that leaves many parents uninformed and without access to experts who can treat their children.
Dr. Gbemi saw this problem manifesting online. When everyday people offered up false remedies for each others kids, she'd find herself intervening. Playing whack-a-mole with each of these threads wasn't going to work, so she opened the āAsk The Paediatriciansā Facebook group. Its mission is to educate regular parents by giving them direct access to medical practitioners.
Members of the āAsk the Paediatricians Foundation,ā born from a simple Facebook group Dr. Gbemisola (center in pink) opened five years ago.
The group grew quickly and organically. Today there are more than 2,000 medical professionals who login to help more than 580,000 parents with their medical questions. Dr. Gbemi has also expanded the groups reach to Nigeria's most impoverished peopleāparents without access to phones or the internetāthrough offline work that brings volunteers to under-resourced regions around the country.
What stuck out to us about our conversation with Dr. Gbemi was how natural her community-building instincts were. We like to say that no matter if your community gathers online or off, the secret to community building isn't about management, it's about creating leaders. Dr. Gbemi has done that at every stage of her journey, giving volunteer moderators tools, bringing other doctors in to do webinars instead of just leading them herself, and giving people all sorts of roles and ways to plug into the mission in their local areas.
Dr. Gbemi and the ATP team now do outreach offline in Nigeriaās most impoverished communities.
Listen for these two key insights from Dr. Gbemisola Boyede
Donāt manage members. Instead, create more leaders.
No matter if your community gathers online or off, the secret to community building isnāt about management, itās about creating leaders.
Dr. Gbemi has done that at every stage of her journey, giving volunteer moderators ownership and tools, bringing other doctors in to do webinars instead of just leading them herself, and giving people all sorts of roles in their local outreach. Alone Dr. Gbemi knows she is limited, but with other medical professionals help she can magnify her impact.
Online and off, you must give people a chance to keep showing up.
Communities arenāt communities if members donāt keep showing up. Consistent shared activities are crucial for any community to gather around, but often forgotten in online spaces.
Dr. Gbemi and her fellow doctors host consistent shared activities in the ATP Facebook group ā live webinar and Q&A programs that parents know they can tune into each week.
In times like these when all of our schedules and routines are being rebuilt from scratch, consistent online organizing is one of the biggest values a community leader can offer their people.
šš»Say hi to Dr. Gbemisola Boyede and Learn more about Ask The Paediatricians
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