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 Nigeria, child mortality rates are high because of a common challenge: a geographic and information gap between parents and practitioners that leaves many parents uninformed. To solve this problem, Dr. Gbemi opened an "Ask The Paediatricians" Facebook group five years ago. Today, that group connects 580,000 parents with medical questions to more than 2,000 doctors, nurses and experts. What stuck out from our conversation with Dr. Gbemi was how natural her community-building instincts were. 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.
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 Ā 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.
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.
If you want to get involved with Ask The Paediatricians, you can find their group on Facebook or head to askthepaediatricians.com
Grab your copy of GET TOGETHERāour handbook on community-building š„: bit.ly/gettogetherbook
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