Twitter is a marvellous thing. It connects you up, warms your heart, nurtures your soul and feeds your mind – a bit like hospice and palliative care!
Moreover, as a community, it expands and challenges thinking and enables the sharing of ideas, experiences and resources across physical, organisational and intellectual boundaries.
The phenomenally successful @WeNurses, through Teresa (@AgencyNurse) and Nick Chinn (@NRCUK), has pioneered the way of using social media to connect people in sharing knowledge, ideas, information, support and data in order to improve and drive evidence based care.
Earlier this year, this got us thinking about how we could share more end of life care experiences and ideas across multiple roles; could we use social media to encourage reflection and discussion? What did nurses offer in particular? How could we support current and future end of life leaders in all roles and all settings? What could we do to make end of life evidence and resources accessible and useful?
So we set about thinking and talking about it – on Twitter of course – and that is how @WeEOLC #WeEOLC was born, as part of the #WeCommunities (www.wecommunities.org)
The vision is that @WeEOLC #WeEOLC will become a Twitter community of end of life care learning and practice. We want it to be the “go to” place for any health and social care professionals who work with people approaching the end of life, and with those who are important to them.
It will provide a space for sharing evidence and resources (through #WeEOLC #EBP) as well as generating interaction and debate.
We actively encourage involvement and discussion about a range of topics related to end of life care, from all roles and in all settings. We will be developing the community over the next few months to include different ways of engaging and learning, and welcome ideas and suggestions along the way.
Get involved
@WeEOLC #WeEOLC chats will be held on the first Tuesday of every other month from 8-9pm (UK time). The first chat is taking place on 6 October, with others scheduled for December, February, April, June and August.
These chats will involve discussion of a case study and the dissemination of end of life care resources and evidence through #EBP and #WeEOLC. The #WeEOLC will also be used to curate and continuously share end of life resources and evidence between chats sessions.
You can find out more about @WeEOLC #WeEOLC on our blog on the #WeCommunities website and in our short cartoon on YouTube.
The co-creators of @WeEOLC are Sarah Russell (@learnhospice), Laura Middleton Green (@heblau) and Bridget Johnston (@BridgetJohnst) There was also input from others to the original format and idea including Sharon Hudson, Sue Spencer and Alison Leary.
Leave a Reply