Moraitis, I

Zegeye, MI

Medical Education Online

English

PubMed

Irene Moraitis

Miriam I. Zegeye

Directory of Open Access Journals

Expanding the use of Twitter for medical education

Spiral - Imperial College Digital Repository

LETTER TO THE EDITORExpanding the use of Twitter for medical educationWe have read Galiatsatos et al.’s recent article (1)about the use of Twitter and other social mediawith great interest, as they have the power togreatly enhance medical education. It is encouraging tosee the large uptake of the Twitter page by the residentsand the continued use of it.Twitter, as a universal resource, allows the quick andeasy dissemination of information worldwide. It has thecapability to help create a global medical communitywhere high-class institutions can share their resourcesfreely with less advantaged medical communities.We have already witnessed medical education attemptto keep up with the advances in the digital sector with theintroduction of eLectures, ePortfolios and so on; how-ever, the full potential of social media has yet to betapped. This scope spans far wider than the residentsGaliatsatos studied and could include undergraduatestudies. Twitter could allow medical students to stay upto date with relevant advances regardless of whichplacement or hospital they are in. This is particularlyrelevant to the UK where students rotate through anumber of different hospitals within the same medicalschool. Furthermore, the fact that Twitter posts arelimited to a ‘bite-sized’ 140 characters can be used tomake research more accessible and applicable to thestudents’ clinical experiences. The use of Twitter could befurther expanded to include useful teaching aids such asmnemonics. This has already been used by a number ofInstagram users with over 251,000 followers (@doctord-conline), which shows great potential for other socialmedia platforms.With the vast majority of students having reportedusing social media (2), Twitter would enable the easyadvertisement of educational events and research oppor-tunities as well as being able to directly ask questions on atransparent platform for all who are following to see theresponse.As with any technology, there are obstacles that needto be overcome. The most important one with regard toTwitter is confidentiality. For example, if a post refers tocase-based teaching, patients may still be identifiable bytheir disease or demographics, especially in smallerhospitals. The lack of censorship may also pose a threatto the institution’s reputation. Both these issues havealready been noted with Facebook (3).There is, of course, scope to take the use of socialmedia even further in the healthcare community. Aspublic health and health promotion are currently trend-ing, the power of Twitter and other social media can beharnessed by national departments of health to reach thepopulation. Moreover, to prevent the aforementionedissues, a social media platform for sole use by healthcareprofessionals could be developed.Irene MoraitisFaulty of MedicineImperial College LondonSir Alexander Fleming BuildingSouth Kensington CampusLondon, SW7 2AZUnited KingdomEmail: Irene.moraitis10@imperial.ac.ukMiriam I. ZegeyeFaulty of MedicineImperial College LondonLondonUnited KingdomReferences1. Galiatsatos P, Porto-Carreiro F, Hayashi J, Zakaria S, ChristmasC. The use of social media to supplement resident medicaleducation  the SMART-ME initiative. Med Educ Online 2016;21: 29332, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v21.293322. Avci K, Celikden SG, Eren S, Aydenizoz D. Assessment ofmedical students’ attitudes on social media use in medicine: across-sectional study. BMC Med Educ 2015; 15: 18.3. White J, Kirwan P, Lai K, Walton J, Ross S. ‘Have you seen whatis on Facebook?’ The use of social networking software byhealthcare professions students. BMJ Open 2013; 3: e003013.Medical Education OnlineMedical Education Online 2016. # 2016 Irene Moraitis and Miriam I. Zegeye. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium orformat and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.1Citation: Med Educ Online 2016, 21: 33010 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/meo.v21.33010(page number not for citation purpose)

Expanding the Use of Twitter for Medical Education

Crossref

https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/38812/9/33010-208459-1-PB.pdf

Expanding the Use of Twitter for Medical Education

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Directory of Open Access Journals

Spiral - Imperial College Digital Repository

Crossref