I am a novice Tweeter. It began in summer 2013 with a session we put on for aspiring medical students from local schools. Three days before the event it dawned on me that 17 year olds are a social media bunch. I got myself a Twitter account and enthusiastically promoted it to them. They took it pretty well and offered lots of coaching advice.
In October, I was at the London Future of Health Conference. Those two days opened my eyes about how social media can add to the community, health and social care dialogue. I saw how Twitter connected people. As I sat in a room with 1,000 people the #futureofhealth popped up on my Twitter account. I started connecting with people in the room discussing and sharing what the speakers were making us think. Those who could not be at the event joined us and the dialogue widened across the world.
I met patient experts, self-management gurus, policy advisors and third sector innovators in a brand new way. Having a conversation through asking questions and sharing thoughts. I came away from the conference with ideas that I hoped would help me in my quest to understand what our hospice community engagement strategy should be.
I have learnt that Twitter can be tricky.
On the one hand I emerge breathless and exhilarated from Twitter conversations. On the other, when we engage with our local health and social care community, we have little success despite national communities being very active eg @WeNurses has 13,284 followers!
I have been assertively challenged on Twitter and learnt to respond, facilitating dialogue rather than confrontation. @DannyAnth tells us that the younger generation are abandoning both Twitter and Facebook. So it is not the only answer. You will not reach everyone.
There is the reasoned argument that in some ways social media is a big self-contained pool because you tend to only follow people with similar interests. But, and this is a big one to me, I think one of its great strengths is that it connects people with similar passions from a range of experiences.
For example, in one day at the 2013 Chief Nursing Officer conference (#CNOSummit) there were 3,601 tweets from 723 students to the Chief Nursing Officer. Patient advocates such as @anyadei, @allyc375, @Patient_Leader, @paintoolkit2 challenge health and social care professionals and are challenged right back. Experts such as @shirleyayres and @amcunningham lead the way in social media dialogue. @HelenHSAUK motivates us to think about person centered care in different ways through one page profiles.
Community engagement
So coming back to community engagement what does this mean to the Hospice of St Francis? Community engagement… tricky to define as it has multiple meanings from clinical to fundraising. Twitter gave us a new forum to find out what others were doing and why. As we develop our community engagement strategy, Twitter has enabled us to research ideas and projects outside of the hospice drawing us into other worlds such as co-production and self-management.
We are keen to maximise our contribution. We want to help build the resilience and self-management of our community and raise awareness of living with dying, death and bereavement. Twitter challenges us to think in different ways. It exposes us to other models and programmes so that we make the most of our expertise and capacity. We can do lots of things but we can’t do everything. Our community engagement strategy will have specific work streams, with measurable outcomes. Those work streams have been partly influenced by using Twitter to connect and research across settings and experiences.
Final reflection
After my first article on Advance Care Planning was published on ehospice I had 102 responses within 12 hours. Over 80% of them were through Twitter; comments, thoughts, encouragement and challenges. It really made me sit and think. Through Twitter we are reaching and being reached by new and different audiences every day.
Why not engage with Sarah on Twitter at @learnstfrancis, or share your thoughts by commenting on this article. Don’t forget you can follow the latest news on ehospice via our Twitter account: @ehospicenews and you can also share this article using the social media icons below (desktop website only).
If you would like to contribute an opinion piece of your own, don’t hesitate to get in touch by emailing info@ehospice.com One of the key aims of ehospice is to share the expertise and opinions of people working in hospice, palliative and end of life care, whatever their role. We would love to hear from you.
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