Fifty Shades of Grey: Social Media and How Online Behaviours of Healthcare Providers Affect Real-World Professional Practice

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Rivero, Joel

• The advent of social media in recent years has created an enormous opportunity for information to be exchanged at a global level. Healthcare providers in particular appear to be turning to social media at increasing rates for both personal and professional use. However, due to its viral nature, the use of social media can lead to the blurring of personal and professional boundaries in the healthcare world. As well, healthcare providers working in regulated professions are often governed by regulatory bodies and are expected to adhere to each profession's codes of ethics and conduct, even in the virtual world. This study looks at the current literature and research to better understand how the online behaviours and the personal use of social media by healthcare professionals in regulated professions affects them professionally. Current research and literature demonstrates that great strides have been made to better prepare digital natives and future healthcare graduates in navigating the benefits and challenges of the social media world. However, there appears to be little research on how digital immigrants learned about and navigate online communication platforms while maintaining their respective professions’ codes of ethics and conducts. Each healthcare profession’s regulatory bodies also appear to handle acceptable online behaviours in silos, with each profession apparently dealing with their own unique challenges. There is an opportunity for regulatory bodies to not only collaborate together interprofessionally, but to also work with established online communication experts as well as their frontline healthcare workers when setting social media policies. This would not only improve online behaviours of regulated healthcare workers through better understanding of each regulatory body’s codes of conduct and ethics, it would empower front-line healthcare workers to better utilize e-professionalism to promote overall communication best practices, ultimately improving positive patient outcomes.

• Date created

  2023-08-08

• Subjects / Keywords

  • healthcare workers
  • e-professionalism
  • social media
  • personal use
  • code of conduct
  • policies
  • boundaries

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-1t46-q358

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International