#hcsmca: The Future Beckons

By Pat Rich with Shirley Williams and Colleen Young

#hcsmca Vision: Driving positive social collaboration for better health and health care.

• Is the above statement a vision for #hcsmca that resonates with you?
• Is it a vision that provides the emotional and strategic underpinning to allow the community to build on existing strengths and grow over the next few years?

 These are the questions we are asking you, the #hcsmca community, as we complete this phase of a journey of reflection of #hcsmca’s purpose and future that began almost a year ago. When these and other questions are answered to the satisfaction of the community, we believe #hcsmca will have a strong organizational base to allow it to continue to flourish. 

Pat Rich

The questions we are asking now are very different the types of questions posed in a Dec. 2013 post – #hcsmca: Is yesterday’s Future Ready for Tomorrow – when I (Pat Rich) asked whether the model of #hcsmca remained relevant to the community it had grown to serve.

The post prompted tweetchats at the beginning of this year (Jan. 8 transcript) in which the #hcsmca community gave a resounding ‘yes’ to the main question I asked and then looked at what was working well and what could be improved. See #hcsmca: Taking Stock at 4 Years for a summary of feedback you shared and an outline of next steps.

As a result of those discussions, Shirley Williams, #hcsmca founder Colleen Young and I completed a process with volunteer advisory members to develop a vision and mission for #hcsmca.

We recognize that, like all successful organizations, even a virtual, volunteer-based organization such as #hcsmca needs to have collectively accepted underpinnings to survive and to continue to grow. We need a clear understanding of who we are, what we are doing, and how we are going to achieve those goals.

To help provide guidance on the vision for our  community, the #hcsmca vision-mission advisory members were invited to describe

1. What success for the community would look like in 2017,
2. What the purpose of the community would be at that time,
3. How the community would deliver on this purpose, and
4. What is the value/benefit of the community.

We received many thoughtful responses, and from these responses Shirley conducted an analysis to identify key themes and common threads, which Colleen and I reviewed. From these responses we have crafted a draft vision and mission statement for consideration of the broader community.

The draft vision – a short statement that accurately reflects the aspirations of our community – is what you see in quotes at the beginning of this post. The draft mission statement – a pragmatic statement on our reason for being – has been crafted to read as follows:

#hcsmca Mission

The #hcsmca community is an inclusive network for all Canadians who are passionate about health and health care.

The community’s mission focus is to facilitate communications, provide a central hub of social health information, support innovative and collaborative solutions to improve health and health care delivery.

The networked #hcsmca community discusses, researches and problem solves current health care ideas, challenges and opportunities. The community leverages its diverse knowledge pool, social media and other digital collaborative tools to facilitate an open forum to share perspectives, best practices and new ideas

The #hcsmca is a community of respect, inclusion, diversity and openness.

The value and benefit of the community is access to a diverse network of people with a vast collective wisdom to support ideas, solutions, information , research and know-how.

Although #hcsmca geographical focus is Canada, the community has a global reach.

Shirley Williams

Vision and mission statements are not easy things to do right, especially if they are to capture the aspirations and dreams of the type of forward-looking thinkers who spend time contributing to #hcsmca. Shirley deserves kudos for using her organizational expertise to take the initial thoughts from almost two dozen leading #hcsmca participants and synthesize them into one statement.

But we realize the statement needs to be one that resonates with the larger community. So on Nov. 5 at 1pm ET, the focus of the #hcsmca chat will be to get your feedback on the vision and mission statements.

Following this feedback, Shirley, Colleen and myself will fine-tune the vision and mission, and provide more detail on the final framework of the principles that will underpin our community moving forward.

Whether you are a regular participant on #hcsmca, a past participant, or just an occasional visitor, we encourage you to join the Nov. 5 chat and help crowd-source the future of Canada’s premier volunteer social media health network.

• T1  Is the vision for #hcsmca the correct one? Does it resonate with you?
• T2  Does the mission statement reflect #hcsmca’s reason to exist?
• T3 Does the mission statement capture the key value of the community?

If you can’t make the chat or want to use more than 140 characters, leave your feedback in the comments of this blog. Comments will be included in the final analysis and contribute to our crowd-sourced vision, mission and future.

You can read the transcript of the November 5 #hcsmca chat.