Networking in Palliative care

18th International Conference of Indian Association for Palliative Care just concluded in Lucknow with a call to explore adopting social media as one of the tool to network amongst peers and share knowledge to bridge islands of excellence.

Delegates from Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Singapore, UK and USA along with their Indian colleagues attended the conference organised by Cancer Aid Society. Two sessions ran by n i i t i consulting on the importance of social media networking for promoting palliative care across the world received enthusiastic response. Except for the handful of delegates using twitter or facebook, rest of them were mostly using email as a tool for communication.

Case studies show-cased on the power of social media ranged from :

• Recent campaign to oust Hosni Mubarak in Egypt  and the role of social media in accelerating the downfall
• How sustainable tourism companies used facebook as a tool to network and raise funds online during the crisis of Cyclone Aila in 2009
• How footprints initiatives get support from innovative micro-funding model of worldnomads
• Real time results of how users of #IAPCON11 manage to network with peers in Australia, US, UK and rest of the world.
• Max Coop - a network promoting 'Open Health through Open Source
• Ushahidi platform on how effectively it was employed during Kenyan riots of 2008
• Nila foundation facebook campaign crowd-sourcing sketches for its publication

While the sessions ignited interest amongst novices to social media, many 'I-have-twitter-but-I-don't-use' delegates were urged to explore the potential of social media, while the 'converts' were urged to build up a palliative care wiki to encourage collaborative content creation about various experiments going around in different parts of the world.

Will be interesting to see some of the recommendations given to set up the next conference in Kolkatta is implemented.

Second part of the workshops specifically involving student volunteers and core team of Institute of Palliative Medicine will be on 19th Feb in Kozhikide.