A brief summary of the learning session and key takeaways.
Video content
Hi and welcome to the fourth and last mini learning session. Here I will summarise our learning from today’s other session and provide some top tips for using social media as a healthcare professional. We will then end with a reflective activity.
In summary we have learnt that social media brings many opportunities for healthcare professionals, including networking and training opportunities. In addition, social media is also useful for patients by providing educational information and building trust with healthcare professionals and their departments.
And while social media does bring opportunities, there are pitfalls that we should be aware of.
And so it’s important as a registered or trainee healthcare professional to familiarise yourself, as we’ve done in this learning session, with the updated HCPC standards that exist to keep you and your colleagues safe, and importantly protect service users.
Finally, as well as the HCPC standards, we’ve discussed that there are many other resources available to help guide your social media use.
We next wanted to provide some top tips for using social media going forwards.
First, think before you post. We should assume that everything we post is available to a much wider audience, and we should ask ourselves if we would say the same thing in a face-to-face interaction with a colleague, or a member of the public.
Our second tip, is to fact or source check the information you’d like to share. Is that information from a verified or trusted source?
Thirdly, always act professionally. We should maintain appropriate boundaries and confidentiality, as highlighted in the HCPC standards and remember that we should be keeping the public’s trust and confidence at all times.
And finally, if we are ever in doubt about using social media, is it ok to seek advice from an experienced colleague or team, for example your employer’s communications team.
To end this learning session, you might now like to reflect and develop an action plan for how you might use social media in your healthcare practice. Will you change how you use social media going forwards? Think about how aware you are of who follows you on social media and who might see what you post? Do you need to change your privacy settings? Or do you need to review your employer’s policy on social media. Perhaps this session has even triggered a great idea on how you might use social media to benefit your practice.
Now please take some time for your own reflections.
After which, there is a short quiz to test you on some of the content from today’s learning session and you can find this on the next page of the website.
Thank you for listening and we hope these sessions have been informative.