For everyone that attended AADE 13 in Philadelphia, I hope you enjoyed your visit and have had ample time to recover. During the meeting I was recruiting future bloggers for our home page and approached one of the Pennsylvania members about writing a blog. This is a member that would certainly write an entertaining and informative blog. The response stopped me for a moment because this person was so correct and I had one of those V8 moments (note me hitting my forehead). The member said why don’t we start discussions on what was your day like? I thought this might have a lot of merit, and started to think of ways we could do this.
Late last week, I was discussing with my co-workers new ideas on support for our patients and insuring the documentation for our program was correct. We were reviewing ideas from AADE 13 such as apps, websites, bloggers, magazines etc and I realized a commons thread between support for people living with diabetes, and support for people providing diabetes education.
Many educators work in small departments or might even be the only educator in their hospital or practice. While at AADE 13 I spoke with at least 3 different educators facing possible or definite closure of their departments. Who could educators turn to for just that shot of “we have your back” support?
So what is a discussion thread on “How was your day?” but a form of virtual support for each other? The My AADE Network has bloggers, information and virtual discussion. It is your one stop site to share your experiences, or find new ideas and it doesn’t always have to be all business. For example, late Wednesday I saw an announcement from the Advocacy Forum on a “tweet in” at 8 pm. Consider it a virtual tweet flash mob, where people involved / living with diabetes tweeted at the same time to their legislators regarding an upcoming Diabetes Technology Meeting and the FDA on Strip Safety. I have a twitter account but had never tweeted, don’t know if I will ever tweet again, but it only took a few minutes to ask both Casey and Toomey to send aides to this meeting. Without that announcement I would never had known about contacting these senators in that way.
I will start a thread in my LNG forum, and hope to see others also start a discussion for their areas. The Pennsylvania My AADE Network can be a source of support. Bring your problems and your celebrations; we want to be there with you.