Week 1, Day 3

Welcome to the third day of your externship with Concussion Alliance!

We are looking forward to helping you get up to speed on your concussion knowledge and then up and running on your projects this week. You’ll have concussion curriculum every day, and we’ll spend time on remote teamwork and shared learning. You’ll also start doing background research on your projects and learn about our process in preparation for writing for the newsletter next week.

Our first expert guest speaker is Dan Fogarty on Thursday; Dan is a concussion patient and advocate, as well as a CA community member. We’ll also be having a discussion on Shaken Brain on Friday.

There are two tasks to do today:

• Start looking at your project resources!

• Job specific software training

  • Science writers

    • Squarespace tutorials

      • Pages and content basics (the Pages and Blocks section should be particularly useful)

      • All about images

      • Further optional reading:

      • Creating a multilingual site in Squarespace

  • Digital & social media externs, here are Zoom tutorials created by Anna:

    • How to use Canva to create social media posts and stories:

    • Creating infographics with Canva

    • Creating infographics and charts with Canva

  • Digital & social media externs, check out some Powtoon tutorials.

Educational Resources:

1. Read the 5th Consensus Statement on Concussion in Sport.

• Start with this University of Calgary MOOC video on the process behind the consensus

• Read this article — ramifications of the postponement of the sixth International Conference on Concussion in Sport, which was supposed to happen in October.

• A new consensus statement is released every four years following a global summit; this statement is from 2016. A few things to focus on

  • Does this view of concussions - and especially concussion care - align with your current understanding? Try to notice what parts of the information haven’t diffused to your own or a broad understanding of concussions.

  • Do you notice any gaps in knowledge or areas that weren’t covered in the 5th consensus?

  • This document is written for healthcare providers treating sports injuries. How do you see this being applied outside of sports for diagnosis or recognition of concussions? How is this report useful for medical professionals?

  • What are some potential barriers to bringing this knowledge to patients?

  • At Concussion Alliance, we put emphasis on the fact that concussions can affect any individual and each is affected in different ways. Concussions are not an injury specific to any demographic. How does the 5th consensus demonstrate that? How does it falter in doing so?

2. Go over Dan Fogarty’s LinkedIn and formulate one or two questions for him

• Dan struggled significantly with persistent concussion symptoms and had to do much of his own research. He eventually built a care team of specialists that helped him recover.

• A helpful starting point for questions is to consider Dan’s experience as a patient and the impacts that his physical and cognitive symptoms had on his health.