Well, thank you all for coming today to listen to us talk about two things that I'm very passionate about, social media and advocacy. I'm so passionate about that, that I recognize over half of the people in this room from social media, and maybe more because there's people in the back of my eyes aren't what they used to be. The other person who is here is my division director. I really appreciate her being here. She has very little interest in social media, but a lot of interest in supporting me with advocacy. So, that is greatly appreciated. I have a terrible sense of timing. So, if you see me looking down at my phone, I'm either looking to see what the response is or checking and making sure that I'm not going over time. Anyway, thank all of you again for coming. I have by far, in my opinion, the easier part of this debate. In fact, Anne-Marie and I talked about this. We're both interested in advocacy. We're both interested in social media. But I do think that it is important and I'm so glad that she spent the last 20 minutes talking to you about how to do it in a way that is intentional, and to know that there are some downsides to it as well. So, that was really important. So, I don't have any disclosures. Some of you may have seen me on various social media platforms. I am not on X quite as much anymore, but have been tweeting a lot about this conference, which is reminding me of the old days, which was really fun. So, I first do want to talk about why are intensivist advocates? I think a lot of us don't see ourselves in that role. A lot of us think, well, that's for the general pediatrician, that's for other people. But we need to advocate to try to keep people out of our intensive care unit as much as possible. In my opinion, that is our responsibility. But then, social media, they asked me to talk about that as well. So, I can't spend my whole talk on just advocacy. So, talk about the different social media sites, and when you might use which particular one. Then, talk about again, like Ann Marie was saying, disseminating accurate information, and combating disinformation. One thing that I want to say is, why are we advocates? We're advocates because there's so much out there in this world that affect our patients. My main area of research and advocacy is gun violence, voting, immigrant child family health, and then also access to care. But your particular thing could be anything. A lot of these things, when we get to the root cause of what is going on, for gun violence for instance, a lot of the disparity and a lot of the burden of gun violence is caused by things that also lead to other admissions to the intensive care unit like systemic racism, poverty, keeping people down. So, those things that can lead to an epidemic of gun violence can also make certain groups more likely to end up in the ICU. As you heard from Dr. Jerome Adams yesterday with his own personal experiences as a black male child and what he was exhibiting with his symptoms for asthma, and how the healthcare system was treating him or not treating him the way that he deserved to be treated. That's why I do this because I think everybody should have the best access to the best outcomes, the best medical care, and that we should make sure that in our roles as trusted voices that we are providing that. I liked the slide that he put up yesterday that looked at equality and equity, but the slide that I actually like a tiny, tiny bit more, no disrespect to Dr. Adams is justice. So, it's not just that everybody gets the supports that they needed, but it's that we need to address the cause of inequity in the first place and remove the barriers to that. So, again, I really like the equity. I'm very interested in that, but we need to push that even further if we are able. So, why us? Why should we tell the story? What is special about us that makes people listen to us? Individual voices and group voices are incredibly important. We are credible. We are the experts. People want to hear from us. When I go to talk to a legislator as a physician, we will get a level of respect usually that we may or may not see, if I went to see them in my role as a private citizen, and I have done both. I'm very careful to inform my institution of all of the stuff that we're doing, maybe a little bit too much as Dr. Quaid knows. But I am very careful to inform our public relations and our government affairs. I know that my hospital's social media account follows me. I know that a couple of the legislator media account follows me, and so I'm careful about what I post and how I present myself on there, although I am my authentic self. We can influence policy. I have put out tweets or op-eds or whatever, and had legislators directly contact me about that. I've had CNN, NBC, other organizations contact me about that. So people are listening to what you are putting out there. So we can influence policy, and we can use the power of non-identifiable stories, unless we have the consent of the patient or parent. We can use that combined with evidence to make something that is real and personal and influence policy. We did that in Illinois by enacting, I keep wanting to say federal assault weapons ban because that would be my ultimate goal, but a statewide assault weapons ban in Illinois, and also a bill about safer storage education targeting different areas throughout the state and an evaluative component for that. So they do listen to that. We were intimately involved in creating both of those bills. For different advocacy roles though, right now as the election year is coming up and we're gearing up towards that, I couldn't resist the opportunity to encourage everybody to make sure that they are voting. From a professional point of view, Ann Marie touched on the difference between advocacy and lobbying. So not all of advocacy is lobbying. Advocacy can be talking about everybody wearing seatbelts without going further and saying, we have to make a law or I'm going to make a law to tell everybody to wear a seatbelt. So that would be the difference between advocacy and lobbying. So for instance, for gun violence, I personally think and I have talked to people at SCCM about our role as a professional organization maybe not to lobby, because that's not in their bylaws to do, but to speak out against that. They did that by sending out that email to us highlighting the stuff that they had done. As a small note, as a power of social media and advocacy, I tweeted out yesterday that while I think that this is a fantastic program that the people in charge of the Congress this year have put together, there's not one single session on gun violence, and that is the leading cause of death in children in the United States. Five minutes after I tweeted that, the person who is in charge of the Congress for next year reached out to me and said, let's make that happen. So that's a way that you can see immediate changes for some of that. I've also reached out to elected officials when I was doing an AAP legislative lobby day, and I couldn't get a hold of them to make an office. I tweeted at them. Five minutes later, the representatives tweeted me back, and I had an appointment with them later that day. So people look at that and people follow that. Again, when I am in a professional capacity, I am very careful to make sure that anything that I tweet or retweet is supported by evidence or I'll say this is my opinion. Because I do have a little bit, not as much as I used to, but I do have a little bit of a following on Twitter, and I don't want people to be looking at that and trusting me and what I am saying without me going to the effort of making sure that that is factually correct from my personal slash professional account. So I have not mastered the art of separating personal and professional, and in some ways I have not needed to, and that's in part because I live in a state and work in an organization that is very supportive of all the advocacy that I do. Then it's a way to communicate effectively to the public. So I think that that's really important to know. On a personal standpoint, if I want to say who I want to vote for, who I'm going to donate for, who I'm going to promote as a political candidate, I'm very clear to put that for my personal rather than my professional account. As a professional pediatrician who works for children, I'll work with anybody who will help kids. So these are just an example of some of the things that you might be interested in. I'm interested in every single one of these issues, but I do have my primary issues as well. So some advocacy tools that we can use. So professional organizations including SCCM, do use their power to advocate for change on a systemic and legislative level. They impacted rules on changes in critical care. They have developed standards for professional conduct for COVID-19 treatment. They're active talking about vaccination, firearm injury prevention, the Healthcare Workers Resilience Act, all these things that are important to all of us in this room. Through the American Academy of Pediatrics, if you are a pediatrician and interested in doing that, you can further go on to become an official spokesperson for the AAP, which is something that I have done. Sometimes I'll do interviews with them or with various outlets about all of these things that are important to me and important to the AAP. I did reach out to the people at SCCM, Media Relations Team at SCCM, and they have a lot of great work that they do and they showed all of that to me, but they don't have the same official spokesperson role where anybody in the Congress could be part of that as something like the AAP does. Speaking of media, in part because of my relationship that I've developed on Twitter, and in part because I just like to write and do op-eds, we have been able to develop relationships with different organizations like CNN, and NBC, a little bit with CBN, but mostly NBC in Chicago, CBS in Chicago, and Fox in Chicago. If they know that they have a story that they want to do on guns, either my public relations team will ask me if I'm available to do something like that, or sometimes the reporters will reach out to me directly. Sometimes I'll get the same opportunity from doing commentaries on that I sometimes publish in the Tribune or the Sun Times or something like that, and have people reach out to me from that as well. So, you can use the media to get to a larger population, a very large population, and you can use social media as a way to further spread that or to contact, or be in contact and form relationships with those in the media, so that you are able to have that reach. There's actually a fair amount of research on the effect of social media, but some of it conducted by people in this very room. Ann Marie pointed one out earlier and Dr. Kadadkar is back there supporting us, which I appreciate. But there's also been beyond band-aids for bullet holes. Firearm violence is a public health priority. There have been specific things about outcomes of children with firearm injuries admitted to the pediatric ICU. The reason that I put this in the social media part is that Dr. Tasker, who is the editor of SCCM, has made that open access and uses the PCCM website, and Twitter, and Instagram as a way to promote some of these sorts of things. So, we are publishing there. They very much look at who is tweeting that out, where it gets shared on Instagram, where things come from. So, that is very much a part of what they do for PCCM. Again, I talked about how you can reach out to elected officials, and you do not, by the way, have to do legislative lobbying to be an effective advocate just because I like to do it. Then, the social media tools that we talked about, I put this at the bottom because it's a way to put all that together, and to point out that SCCM does have a very active social media presence, and while they're not doing legislative lobbying, they are doing a lot of things on lobbying. If I had time, I would have put in slides representing all the stuff that they talked about yesterday. I would have put in slides about talking about the indigenous culture, and that we heard about in the opening ceremony, about Dr. Adams' slides, about what Lauren Source, our incoming president, highlighted as her priority. So, there's all kinds of things that we can do with that. Anne-Marie already talked about the use of social media with caveats. So, I'm going to just very briefly talk about this. One thing that I would want to say is that there's 40, 50 of us in here. It's a big room, so it doesn't look like that many, but I counted. However, we were both tagged in the post yesterday. There was analysis done of the hashtag PedsICU from January 15th to January 22nd, and that had six million impressions. No matter what I do here at the Congress, I'm not going to reach six million people. The majority of those tweets were in the last couple of days or during the Congress. Several of the people in this room were included on the list of the most influential people. Not to like, I know we don't like to promote ourselves too much, and I'm not on Twitter as much anymore, but just my tweets alone had 403,000 impressions as of yesterday. So, that's something or this engagement, this shows I'm not speaking to 400,000 of you here, but that is a way to get your voice out into the world. So, I'm going to also skip this one because I have been a little bit verbose, and Anne-Marie already talked about this one. But same, that's what I'm just going to say, ditto to what she said before. So, the benefits of social media for me, I have also formed genuine friendships, had a reach that I would never have done just on my own, if I weren't involved in some of this. Then there's fun stuff too, like I run the Peloton Med account badly these days, because I'm not on Twitter very much, but people from Peloton have reached out to me. Sometimes people give me free things, but not very often. That's okay, I don't need free things. We talked about advocacy. You can drive the conversation, you can power the conversation, you can combat misinformation, which is obviously very important. The other way that I like to do is to amplify messages for people who are more expert on the subject than I am. If I want to tweet about gun violence, I think I am an expert in gun violence, and I will do so. If I want to tweet about the lived experience of somebody with gun violence, that's not, I haven't had that experience. So, what I do is follow a lot of people who have had lived experiences, and then I will retweet and amplify that for them. And then for networking, obviously, as I said, I would not be here without all of this. I'm in a community organization. We're not academic, so I don't publish all that much. I would not have had the opportunity to be here without this. I've done research with people, like the Pick You Up. I was invited to, our institution was invited to be part of that. We've done stuff on gender inequity. We've done a couple of other things. And then I get invited to do a decent number of talks and presentations, which is fun, because then I get to come here, meet more of you, and further get to talk about the things that I'm passionate about. And then professional, so a lot of people don't think that advocacy will move their professional career forward. I'm in a health policy scholars program that is through the academic pediatric association and graduating this year. And there are things that we are working on, advancing advocacy as a career path in academic medicine, similar to research or QI or education. And one of these is the advocacy portfolio. However, I have managed to get secured, protected time from my institution, like a .05 FTE, which doesn't sound like all that much. It's a couple hours a year, but it's an investment in advocacy that our division has shown that it is worth it to them, that I'm doing some of this stuff. By the way, SCCM is on all of these platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, even YouTube, even like they have like four TikTok videos, but I counted it. I have not mastered all of these. And as I'm moving away from Twitter, I'm starting to transition a little bit more to Instagram professionally, but I haven't really found a professional home outside of Twitter or X just yet. We talked a little bit about This Is Our Lane, but healthcare workers can have a positive influence on social media discourse. When this study looked at Twitter discourse on firearm injury and COVID-19, they looked at specifically the hashtag This Is Our Lane and Get Us PPE, and most of those were driven by healthcare providers and were more likely to contain healthcare-specific language, language denoting positive emotions, affiliations, and group identity, and then more action-oriented content. We combat myths and disinformation. The disinformation is more malicious, but the misinformation can get out there and cause just as much harm. There is documented research on using social media to make some of these impacts that is out there that Anne-Marie showed you a little bit as well. We happen to have a similar reach, so this is from the same study that she talked about, but I did take it a little bit further and cited courtesy of Dr. Khadjadkar and Dr. Carroll, even though I didn't ask them. Sapna, I hope that's okay. Anyway, she gives me the thumbs up now. So, you can see the spike in tweets at this conference in 2021, or sorry, this conference on the SCCM Congress, and then another thing when WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and then another peak over here when there was an alert about the increase in PICU admissions for hyperinflammatory symptoms. So, you can see in real time that we're disseminating information in a way that would take a much longer time to do in a traditional journal. You can share infographics if you want to reach your patient population. You want them to get vaccinated. I want them to reduce their COVID-19 risk at Lallapalooza, all of these sorts of things, and you can do it in multiple languages so you can have an even broader reach. I just think that this is one of the best ways that I've seen. The Onion is obviously not a medical organization, but every time there is a mass shooting, they'll tweet out, no way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens. Every time they tweet that out, I retweet it. We had talked a little bit about the firearm injury prevention advocacy, and I'm going to just take one extra minute because I think I'm running a little bit behind, but it had a huge impact on medical providers after the NRA tweeted out that somebody should tell anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. So, this mobilized an entire movement of healthcare workers joining forces, finding a common thread and a way that they could talk about gun violence, and it led to lots of research. It led to coalitions and all kinds of things that may or may not have happened had we not had that spark that lit the fire. So, you can see, it just is a little bit of a timeline here. For the This is Our Lane hashtag, there were over 500,000 tweets in about six months period, and that was picked up by 350 mass media publications. So, it led to scientific research, and it led to exposure throughout the media. I also use it to talk about safer storage because I talked about that that's my passion. And if we in critical care do not use some of this, we are going to be left behind. There's tons of other organizations that are using this, and they're using it as effective targeted strategies. Women in cardiology, social media for health advocacy in surgeries, you're talking about internal medicine, even dermatology. I didn't mean to make that sound so scornful, I like dermatologists. Cardio-oncology, OB-GYN. So, other people are using this. The AAP used to be Tweediatrician. Now, you can sign up to do this official social media thing, and they will send you things that are related to advocacy that you can post on Twitter, and I've made lots of friends that way as well. And then to just close, I am one minute and 45 seconds over. So, closing on the same side that Anne-Marie did, to encourage you to become a SCCM engagement ambassador and to follow SCCM on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those platforms. So, thank you so much for listening, and I really appreciate it, and we would love to take questions. Thank you.

social media

advocacy

health professionals

policy influence

misinformation

organizational efforts