ROLES: Author, Digital Producer, Interactive Experience Design, Video Editor, Digital Asset Design
In 2022, in my role as Digital Specialist at SickKids Learning Institute, I had the pleasure of working on an amazing interactive continuing medical education webinar series called Collaborative Conversations with Families to Advance the Clinical Care of Children with Medical Complexities and Disabilities, abbreviated to C6.
The American Academy of Pediatrics published a medical paper I had the honour of being a co-author of, exploring the development, execution and key learnings of this forward thinking CME series in their flagship peer-reviewed journal “Pediatrics”, under the title “Family Partnership in Continuing Medical Education: A Collaborative Experience“. The senior authors on the paper are the incredible physicians and international healthcare leaders highlighted below.
The webinar series was a collaborative partnership between SickKids Learning Institute, Family Voices a network of family organizations in the U.S. and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. leadership of two incredible pediatric complex care physicians at SickKids, Dr. Catherine Diskin and Dr. Eyal Cohen, the webinar series was rooted in the importance of patient/family partnership in clinical care & research. As Dr. Cohen described, the C6 webinar series was “an extension of this principle into continuing medical education” and involved a
What’s the problem? What’s the answer?
When the series wrapped in the summer of 2022, Dr. Catherine Diskin spearheaded the authorship of a collaborative publication whose purpose was to digest and reflect on C6’s answer to the problem that in the field of continuing medical education families are rarely involved as true partners in co-design and co-delivery. Through this process we came to formulate how C6 was filled with beneficial and practical examples of dialogic education, which is “rooted in nonhierarchical conversation, incorporates patient experiences to deepen learners’ perspectives and values through reflection.”
With the article’s publication last by the AAP last week, Dr. Cohen did a beautiful job in taking to Twitter to summarize the publication with this tweet thread:
Parents have a PhD in Life Experience
As one of the family leads, educators and mother to a child with medical complexity reflected during a C6 session, “Parents have a PhD in life experience. And we’re able to bring that to the clinician and they respect that, and they say “Oh you can talk my language.” And we have these real authentic conversations that get somewhere.” Over 10 months the 10-session C6 webinar was delivered to over 1,600 participants. Family caregivers, youth, and friends of children with medical complexity (CMC) were welcomed to join along with health care professionals, researchers, policy makers, and anyone invested in advancing clinical care in CMC, through which a dynamic and vibrant community discussion ensued in each of the sessions. A 9 minute video highlighting key insights and the dynamic community was compiled which you can watch below.
The entire C6 team was an incredible group to have the honour to work with, and I’d like to sign off with waves of gratitude to my co-authors and first and senior authors, to the incredible families involved and with a massive parting call of gratitude to Dr. Catherine Diskin for her generosity, encouragement, and intellectual and human brilliance in the field of medical education and the realm of compassionate care.