Bridging the gap between medical experts and patients 🏥Dr. Gbemisola Boyede of Ask The Paediatricians

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 ‘Ask The Paediatricians’ 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 people–parents without access to phones or the internet—through 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 TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building 🔥: bit.ly/gettogetherbook

To learn more about People & Company and how we work with organizations passionate about their communities, visit: http://people-and.com/