Social Networking in Medicine: The VIIth Nerve Facebook Page
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15273/dmj.Vol40No1.3791Abstract
Background: Social networks including Facebook are gaining popularity in industry, however, health care has yetto fully embrace this trend. Social networking enables unprecedented speed and scope of communication andinformation sharing; mobile devices allow health professionals to feel connected to training hospitals, peers andmentors. The VIIth Nerve is a Facebook page for medical students worldwide, providing a platform to share medicalcases, educational videos and audio sounds.
Methods: A Facebook page was developed and is ongoing. A research team has been established to design and runthe page, and collect data. Demographics, location of users, visits to the page, type of posts and total number ofusers were tracked.
Results: To date, 161 users subscribed to the Facebook page and a total of 44,042 people have been reached. Sixtyfourper cent of subscribers are female, 89 per cent of whom fall between the ages of 18 and 34. Users are from ninecountries and eight different first languages are indicated. It has been found that users are most engaged by visualmaterials, namely videos clips and photos.
Conclusion: Synergies between social networks and medicine is vastly underrepresented in the literature to date.Implications of social media in the learning environment may be of significant value and affect the future practiceof medicine. Future steps will include focus groups to recognize the benefits and pitfalls of using Facebook in thehealth care setting. This research effectively connects students internationally, and will determine how social mediacan effectively be implemented to prepare students for life-long learning.
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