The COVID19 pandemic is forcing everyone to learn new skills on the fly.
- Clinicians are teaching each other how to hotwire a ventilator to serve more than one patient.
- People are 3D printing spare parts for medical equipment and learning how to sew protective masks.
- Parents are sharing strategies for convincing their teenagers to stay home – and then turning around to use those same arguments on their elder parents. (Or maybe that’s just me?)
- People with deep experience in physical distancing and infection control are sharing their tips.
This explosion of peer-to-peer connection and innovation is fueled by need – indeed, an existential threat. It is enabled by the internet’s ability to connect us not only to information, but also to each other.
As I’ve written before, I’m working on a model to help explain the stages of peer connection. Let’s see how it fits our current situation.
The zero stage is when someone feels completely alone in their worry. They may not even know how to express what they need and they don’t have a community to turn to. Lots of people are at this stage right now and they may be scared and/or angry. (How might we reach them?)
The first stage of peer connection is when a person finds someone like them who can say, “I’ve been there. Let me tell you what I know.” For example, I am drinking in first-person stories about what it’s like to have or care for someone with the virus so I can prepare. The shared camaraderie of parents juggling work and child care is another peer online community that is springing up everywhere. (What examples of peer-to-peer connection are you seeing?)
The second stage of peer-to-peer health care is when a problem is solved by a community that has formed. For example, when clinicians in the U.S. began talking with their counterparts in China and Italy, learning from their peers about what to expect. Another example is when people began trading patterns for home-made masks. Then there are the DIY epidemiology tools, like CoEpi, along with the symptom trackers and peer communities that are popping up. In each case the emerging peer group identified a need and people started solving for it, sharing and improving on prototypes. (I’m collecting examples in this Wakelet — please let me know if you have more to add to it.)
The third stage is when people with resources (such as foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and government agencies) take a peer community seriously and lift up the ideas that are being generated. This is when innovations can be taken to scale. For example, researchers are creating platforms and data collection tools to formalize the work that laypeople are doing to document their experiences and look for clues. What examples are you seeing in the context of the pandemic?
Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Featured image: Sewing Masks, by Michael Swan on Flickr.
OK, yes, I hit “publish” about a minute ago but I already have a new, great example of peer connection thanks to my friend & guru, Paige Trevor:
3 experts answer questions on school at home
I see this post as an example of stage two peer connection. A community has sprung up and experts are sharing their tried-and-true AND early-prototype ideas for solving problems.
The line that made me gasp:
“Creativity and self-advocacy is bubbling up in kids. One student reached out and asked to create an Only-Child support group, complete with an article to start the conversation.”
How brilliant is that?!
Thank you for this article and the shout out. I am in awe of educators these days- these three were so generous to share their time and I learned so much by speaking with them. The compassion and grace they hold for parents and children is immense.
I got so much help in the early phases from the http://www.grownandflown.com website and articles written by Italian parents with teens. Comfort and wisdom abounds. And I try to soak it all in.
Peer-to-peer COVID problem solving was the inspiration for this e-scale article that Kat Ross and I wrote: https://doi.org/10.1002/oby.22851. Behavioral science colleagues were asking how to add e-scales to their studies; clinicians were unclear how to replace medication management visits that required a weight measurement. And I think that we both felt better by doing SOMETHING to help.
Thank you for making the jump from Twitter! This is a GREAT example of peer to peer problem solving. And yes, doing something to help is a mental health intervention in itself, I think 🙂
Susannah, I have so many thoughts on this one. First have you seen: https://www.covidinnovations.com/ ? Also, there was some chatter on LinkedIn researcher posts about how research participant engagement has been especially high on online communities lately. Of course, this must be as people are looking for new outlets for connections with others. This is not likely to last, but is an interesting observation. I am working in Detroit small business rapid response and recovery planning. Qualitative feedback from restaurant and small retailers indicates that they are hungry for an efficient way to connect with each other to hear how others are responding/what types of relief are they applying for/what has been the status of those efforts/what are they considering related to restart. Your third stage is super useful for us to think about in this work.
Mary, thank you! I had not yet seen that COVID Innovations site. Fascinating! And I appreciate the window into Detroit’s small business planning.
A story I tracked early was the Texas grocery chain, H-E-B, and how they communicated with counterparts in China all the way back in January in order to better prepare. How might we replicate that idea so that all kinds of businesses and organizations learn, peer to peer, not just the ones blessed with far-seeing executives?
Again, it’s great to see innovation on a small scale, in a single retail chain or cluster of shops, for example, but what we need is to bring those great ideas out of stage two and into stage three. There are accelerants and decelerants for this transition. Positive media coverage, for example, is an accelerant. What others do you see in the field?
People are sharing some great examples of pandemic problem-identification and -solving on Twitter. I will try to capture them here (please correct or expand if I get yours wrong!)
Andrea Downing pointed to a group of people who get together via Zoom every Friday to both commiserate and identify problems that they can tackle.
Again, to see if I can fit this into my model for peer-to-peer health care: Stage One is when people find each other and are able to connect, to validate that yes, this is happening and we can gather to sort things out. Stage Two is when people in the group identify a need and solve for it using the tools they have on hand.
As Andrea wrote: It is an “open agenda where people can share what they need across communities. So for example, the crowdsourced Covid Compass came out of that in March. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/115QxYVvj_-Nntvq9eBe8–XZbqq97hOd7JZIGzZJ7Cc/edit#…).” Click on her tweet to learn more.
CRICO Strategies wrote: “Great thread! We’ve been holding special calls/webinars with our national community of medical professional liability insurers to discuss #COVID19 challenges for our industry, share resources, discuss emerging risks, how to support health care workers, & just to stay connected.”
Another group I was invited to join, in case I could help: Family therapists who are working on ways to create grief-recovery groups via phone or video calls. During one recent call, we role-played how an “inner circle” and an “outer circle” could be defined, allowing people with different points of view or experiences to share their perspectives.
Please add more examples if you see or hear of them. What other peer groups are springing up, online or offline? What problems are they identifying or solving?
More ideas are being shared on Twitter, such as:
Halle Tecco pointed to the COVID Tracking Project, writing, “they’ve stood up an impressive operation with no budget and all volunteers.” Indeed, their About us page is an impressively long list of people, starting with the two journalists who initially built a COVID-19 testing tracker as part of their investigative work for The Atlantic ( Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal) and Jeff Hammerbacher, who had independently built a tracking spreadsheet of his own.
Just for fun, let me try to fit this into my nascent model for peer to peer problem-solving:
Stage 0 = people are wondering how many COVID-19 tests have been done, but they have no community to turn to (isolation)
Stage 1 = people connect with each other and start looking for data (connection)
Stage 2 = data sources are identified; two teams create and refine prototype trackers; volunteers start gathering to help (small-group innovation)
Stage 3 = The Atlantic agrees to publicize and host the project, including designating a staffer to make it their full-time job; volunteers are organized (infusion of resources)
Note: If you see something different or want to add to this, please do! I’m hoping people contribute feedback about what you see, whether the model is useful, etc. Please don’t be shy.
Hugo Campos tweeted:
Are your big questions about #COVID19 not getting answered? We are forming a small partnership of researchers and members of the public to help design #community involvement in COVID-19 #research. No science degree or research background needed. Join us. Right pointing backhand indexhttp://bit.ly/COVID-19UCD
Again, for fun and to practice, let me see how this fits into my model:
Stage 0 = lots of people’s needs are not met, questions are not answered, but they are not sure how to contribute or even ask the right questions (isolation)
Stage 1 = a group gathers (maybe they know each other from previous work, maybe they just see social media posts by people with similar concerns) and starts to organize (connection)
Stage 2 = the group decides to take action, leaders emerge, a plan is hatched (small-group innovation)
Stage 3 = if the group wins funding and/or sponsorship, they could take their work to a higher level (infusion of resources)