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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: High Impact Medicine, 6 months later - Update & Key Lessons, published by Akhil on May 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. With thanks to Jacob Arbeid, George Rosenfeld, Jacob Smith, Thomas Cohen, Jake Mendel (Hi-Med Oxford), Pauline Scheuber (Hi-Med Germany), Erik Jentzen (Hi-Med Germany) and Rahul Shah (Hi-Med Cambridge) for comments. 6 months ago, we launched High Impact Medicine. In this post, we share an update on our progress and the lessons we learnt in running a community building organisation focussed on a particular profession. We hope that this might be relevant to others interested in community building, particularly in professional and workplace groups. High Impact Medicine is a group whose goals are to bring together medics who want to have a wide reaching positive impact, alongside and learning from clinical practice, and explore the opportunities for them to do so. We have 3 main paths to impact: Outreach & community building: our chapters run talks and socials for medics of all grades, from students to doctors working in hospitals or outside of clinical medicine Knowledge building around impact in medicine: we run a fellowship, a podcast and talks. We are planning to run follow up ‘senior’ fellowships as well. Career advice: we help members explore how they can have a large impact alongside, and learning from clinical medicine We set out to foster local, engaged communities of medical students and doctors including those not familiar with EA, focussing on outreach to new interested medics, working alongside EA Medicine who facilitate a global network of medics who are already EA aligned. Since launching: High Impact Medicine has grown to approximately 100-120 members, at least 60 of whom are moderately to highly engaged (definition). Our rough split has been 70% medical students and 30% doctors. Our inaugural fellowship attracted 7 cohorts with a total of 54 fellows We have run many talks and socials in Cambridge, Oxford and London with an average of 15 attendees per event, with speakers including Professor Sir Andrew Pollard We have launched our Podcast Several (≥4) members have taken the GWWC pledge, and ≥3 others have made changes in their career direction as a result of being part of the organisation. We have expanded significantly beyond our initial base in the UK: We recently launched High-Impact Medicine Germany We are running a cohort of our fellowship for medical students in Tehran, Iran We have members in the USA, Australia and Singapore. Our key lessons 1. Having an open framing allows for effective outreach We chose to frame Hi-Med openly - a chance for medics to find out about ways to ‘have a widespread positive impact’ and explore areas such as ‘global health, health policy, biosecurity and mental health’. Our objective was to try and get a lot of people interested in considering their own personal impact and how they could do a lot of good alongside and learning from their medical backgrounds. This was reflected in the fact that a significant number (approximately 25 out of 50) of the fellowship participants were entirely new to EA. Many of the ideas we discussed in the fellowship stem from the Effective Altruism community (e.g. ITN framework, EA-aligned cause areas) but we also drew on material from the wider scientific community in our fellowship, talks and podcast. Our approach was intended to provide medics with information to make their own decisions and enable an honest approach. Hearing ideas without them being exclusively attached to a wider philosophy and in more neutral (rather than persuasive) fashion may help avoid putting people off and allows individuals the freedom to pick aspects they found more meaningful to explore. This helps encourage a ‘truth seeking’ approach that focuses on ‘learning useful tools and asking...