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For over ten years I was a critical care nurse working in one of the most extreme environments the NHS had to offer. It was a crazy place that was full of life support machines. These enabled me to deliver high levels of care to very sick people. It was a place that brought out the both best and the worst in society as people struggled to come to terms with what was going on around them.
To be effective in that environment you had to be a conduit between the unreal world of all the machines and the very real world of the people involved. This doesn't just happen overnight, you have to work extremely hard to develop the skills needed to achieve this. You had to be able to read the life support machines and understand the constant stream of information they provided. You had to learn to relate this to your patient and understand the implications it had for them and their families and most of all you have to be able to communicate effectively with everybody involved.
Managing teams in this sort of an environment takes it out of you which is why I no longer do it but it doesn't mean that the skills I developed have been left behind.
Social media for me has many parallels, not so many sick people but still lots of technology and applications that need to be read and understood. There is still lots of people that need to communicate using the technology. The only difference now is that there are a few less tears involved.