The Intensive Care Network (ICN) has been developed to educate, link and stimulate healthcare professionals involved in critical care, based on what we believe to be one of the key characteristics of Intensive Care: the teamwork and collegiality that occurs when like-minded professionals share a common purpose. It is run by a dedicated team of critical care specialists and trainees committed to providing high quality, free medical education and to do it with style.
ICN has its beginnings in the Sydney Intensive Care Network, established in 2008 by Liz Steel (now Hickson) and Hergen Buscher. These bi-monthly meetings were to educate Sydney critical care trainees as well as give them a chance to meet and network, and see how things were done in other hospitals.
Oli Flower & Matt Mac Partlin joined the team and started the ICN website with Daniel Steel as the man with the IT skills.
Many ventures were tried in the first year, and whilst the library of exam notes were popular, our most accessed content was podcasts. Some of the Intensive Care Podcasts filled a niche that Emcrit and others were already providing to the Emergency Critical Care audience. By podcasting the talks given at the Sydney Intensive Care Network meetings, we were able to amplify the reach of the talks and subsequently the quality, as speakers realised they were talking to a new global audience.
ICN then benefitted tremendously by teaming up with Roger Harris, an ICU specialist who had been running the Bedside Critical Care conference. We helped run the BCC meetings and we recorded the content and distributed it via ICN.
During this period, like-minded colleagues in Victoria and Queensland helped coordinate the equivalent meetings in their states. They contributed the fantastic material from their local speakers and they benefitted from the distribution, exposure and structure ICN could offer.
ICN is a FOAMed website, and we’ve always had close ties with Life In The Fast Lane, PHARM, EMCRIT and a network of other websites that share common values.
From this relationship and a huge amount of work and enthusiasm from the organising committee, the SMACC (social media and critical care) conference was born.
This not-for-profit critical care conference tapped into the growing demand for education that was in-line with the way the FOAMed websites were delivering it, and by harnessing the energy and enthusiasm of these sites and their followers, was a tremendous success.
ICN proudly hosts the media from SMACC, and we acknowledge all the incredible speakers who made SMACC the event it was.
Much of this story is described in the podcast below: BRAVE NEW MEDIA
More about this podcast is available here.
The number of regional networks affiliated with ICN continues to grow… Click on an icon below for more on your local network, or contact us if you want to set one up!
