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Australian Nursing and Midwifery Guidelines on using Social Media

Last week I attended the Primary Health Care Conference in Brisbane.

The official opening remarks to the conference were given by The Hon Mark Butler MP, Minister for Mental Health and Ageing. It was impressive that he managed to sneak in a reference to the carbon tax within the first 10 seconds of his opening remarks but I resisted the urge to heckle him!

He did mention he was on twitter every other sentence, however he is not a MP who interacts in the social media framework he just uses it to promote government policy and himself! I will soon be unfollowing this minister as I like to follow those who use the space to share comments, connect and learn from each other.

The greatest concern I have is with the review of health and medical research in Australia currently occurring. This is the link to the terms of reference for the review. The proposal involves creating centres of research excellence, all well and good until you examine the potential for abuse this creates in the competitive world of research. I am fearful it will create an elitist approach to research and old school boy network that will led to a chosen few being involved in research projects. This chosen few will abuse the system by disseminating the jobs connected to their research amongst their own buddies and it will be a case of who you know and suck up to that will be the biggest influence on whether you are involved in research or not.

The knock on effect for rural areas is the potential for rural researchers to be completely cut out of the loop. Rural health and rural research is not seen as dynamic and sexy enough. How can urban researchers understand the special needs and requirements of the rural community? It is offensive to the rural community of Australia that their needs are being totally ignored but I am not surprised, nothing surprises me anymore I just feel sad.

The main workshop I was interested in attending was presented by Melissa Sweet of Croakey. This presentation at this years Primary Health Care Research Conference aimed to gather thoughts on answering the question, how can primary health care harness the opportunities of the digital media age?

I was particularly drawn to this workshop because as a former New Zealand independent midwife; I am an avid social media user (my husband points out far too avid at times!). I have seen the slow growth of health care providers using social media networks to inform the public, share and support each other across a worldwide stage. I have also found that I am connected and have access to a wider variety of people, across many countries. 
It has opened up my world, increased my knowledge and does not recognise the barriers of language and social class. I am going to steal Melissa’s phrase of, ‘citizen journalism’ to describe my social media space after attending this workshop.

I was shocked and surprised when I found my hand in the air volunteering to be scribe for the session so that the piece could be put on the blog. I even managed to crack a joke in a room packed full of professionals!

Melissa opened up the session with a general introduction to the world of twitter and instead of being asked to turn off our mobile phones we were actively encouraged to tweet from the session. Tweeting involves sharing 140 characters sound bite from your day, it is described as mini blogging. ‘Hash tags’ can connect tweets. 
Tweeting from this session or the conference as a whole could be connected by adding the hash tag, #phcris. This enables twitter users to single out the subject of #phcris and gather all the information people are putting out about the conference.

There are a number of questions that as groups we attempted to address in this workshop.

• ·      Is there a way organisations can approach social media in a positive way rather than a risk management way?

Many hospitals and health care providers block and ban the staff from using social media sites such as Facebook because they see them the potential for time wasting for staff. There has also been a focus on the few privacy issues that have arisen within the spaces. Maybe there is also a general reluctance to take the time out and investigate the benefits of information sharing with it all being placed in the ‘too hard basket’ of policy makers. It is also difficult for those who hold positions of influence to harness the potential for information sharing within these spaces if they themselves don’t understand how they can be used.

• ·      Is there a way that we, as healthcare providers can be proactive rather than reactive in social media?

There has been a report written and released in June 2011 about how to use social media to improve healthcare quality. The mayo clinic is leading the way as an example. ABC open is working to keep people informed. Social media is described as now democratizing healthcare.

We were divided into 6 groups and to hopefully read what those groups discussed I suggest you keep an eye out on the croakey blog for the feedback I wrote (thats if it is good enough!)

Wrapping up

What I gained from this session and from what I have personal experience of is, that social media is a vast resource of information and ability to connect with people. Health care providers are in danger of being crippled by their own fear of the unknown and will be left behind in the wake. There are countless recent examples of how people have been left following disasters with social media as their only means of gaining information and connecting with the outside world. We cannot as responsible health care providers afford to be left behind, we need to be more proactive and get in with the in crowd.