In 2019, the world stopped.
Clinics emptied, borders closed, and we all learned the shape of our own four walls more intimately than we ever expected.

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But even as the world locked down, the DFTB community refused to disappear.
If anything, the urgency only heightened our purpose: to bring people together, learn from each other, and find a way forward for the children in our care.
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We’d spent months immersed in COVID conversations — including the huge task of summarising all paediatric COVID literature.
That evidence summary — which the WHO later referenced — helped clinicians make sense of the chaos.

But we knew we needed something more: a way to gather, to connect, to breathe together again.

So we did something we’d never done before.
We built a fully online global conference.
A blend of live sessions, pre-recorded talks, interviews, music, corridor conversations, and impossibly complex scheduling spreadsheets.

It began at 5pm NZ / 1pm NY / 6am UK — a rolling wave of time zones stitched together into one shared experience.

And somehow, it worked.

There were moments that defined Live + Connected:

• Brad Sobolewski’s talk, Alternate Realities: Fixing a Broken System to Care for Kids, a piece that feels even more relevant in 2025 than it did five years ago.
• Jane Munro interviewing Ronx Ikharia — a conversation crackling with identity, courage, and joy.
• A global research showcase from the great networks:
  • Tom Waterfield (PERUKI)
  • Nate Kupperman (PECARN)
  • Franz Babl (PREDICT)
• Mary Freer interviewing Rob Delaney about his son Henry — a moment of raw tenderness that held the whole room still.
  

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Together, they showed that even in a pandemic, curiosity doesn’t shut down. It adapts.

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And then there were the in-between moments — the ones that capture the spirit of DFTB just as much as any keynote.

Corridor consults, where paediatricians from around the world spilt into breakout rooms to talk shop, share ideas, commiserate, and laugh.
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And musical interludes that stitched the programme together — performances from Coldspray, Suman Biswas, and the ED Musos reminding us that community lives in the spaces between the science.
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Live + Connected was chaotic, ambitious, messy, moving — and utterly alive.
A reminder that even when the world freezes, this community keeps showing up.

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I'll be putting up a special YouTube playlist for all of those talks in the next week, so keep your eyes peeled.
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As we look ahead to DFTB26 in Glasgow, that same spirit is still at the heart of everything we do: connection, courage, curiosity, and care.

👉 Join us in Glasgow — tickets are already going fast:​
​https://dftb26.com/​

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P.S. Live + Connected proved that a conference isn’t defined by a room. It’s defined by the people who show up — wherever in the world they happen to be.