Reference no: EM133311498

Topic: Social Media in Healthcare

The rapid growth of social media has found many healthcare professionals unprepared to face the new challenges or to exploit the opportunities that exist with these forums. The need to maintain confidentiality presents a major obstacle to the healthcare industry's widespread adoption of such technology. Thus, social networking has not yet been fully embraced by many health professionals. Englund and colleagues noted that undergraduate nursing students may face ambiguous and understudied professional and ethical implications when using social networking venues.

Another confounding factor is the increased use of mobile devices by health professionals as well as the public. Smartphones have the capability to take still pictures as well as live recordings, and they have found their way into treatment rooms around the globe.

As a consequence of more stringent confidentiality laws and widespread availability and use of social and mobile media, numerous ethical and legal dilemmas have been posed to nurses. What are not well defined are the expectations of healthcare providers regarding this technology. In some cases, nurses employed in the emergency department setting have been subjected to video and audio recordings by patients and families when they perform procedures and give care during such visits. Nurses would be wise to inquire-before an incident occurs-about the hospital policy regarding audio/video recording by patients and families as well as the state laws governing two-party consent. Such laws require consent of all parties to any recording or eavesdropping activity. Social media platforms include such electronic communication outlets as Facebook, Twitter (microblogging site), LinkedIn, Snapchat, and YouTube. Other widely used means of instantaneous communications include wikis, blogs, tweeting, Skype, Instagram, and the "hangout" feature on Google+. Use of social networking has increased dramatically among all age groups.) Facebook reported an average of 2.38 billion active users globally as of March 31, 2019. The number of users has continued to increase. In 2020, Facebook had over 2.6 billion active monthly users worldwide as compared to 955 million active monthly users in 2012 and those users spend an average of 38 minutes on Facebook per day. Twitter is a social media microblog platform that allows users to microblog micro posts, or frequent, short posts. Twitter's influence on health care continues to grow reported 2,000,000,000+ tweets related to healthcare, covering 17,265 topics. (McGonigle& Mastrian, 2022)

McGonigle, D. & Mastrian, K. (2022). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett

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