Last night Australia and New Zealand had their inaugural “Tweetup” using the hash-tag #hcsmanz with about 20 participants from nursing, medical, pharmacy, public health, IT and others. A Tweetup will be held each Sunday evening at 22:00NZ, 20:00AEDT, 19:00AEST, 19:30ACDT, 17:00AWST.
Twitter has been in the news a bit in Australia. Mainly due to the Australian newspaper outing a pseudonymous blogger and recently threatening to sue a journalism academic. A view that seems to have been taken by some in the media is that Twitter is full of anonymous trolls defaming away left, right and centre.
What it really is is a terrific for communication and dissemination of information at whatever level you wish to use it, informally or in a more formal manner.
Several regular discussion groups looking at the use of social media in health care meet on twitter at various times. The European Union have one as does the USA and Canada.
Our first discussion looked at the recently released AMA guidelines “Social Media and the Medical Profession” and issues encountered in using social media in your health/healthcare setting. It already seems to have kicked a goal with the transcript being sent to the AMA Council of Doctors-in-Training and Guidelines Working group.
If you wish to know more send a message to myself, Ed Butler or Ben Harris-Roxas or follow @hcsmanz on Twitter.
You can set up a hashtag #hcsmanz on your twitter-feed to follow and participate in the discussion and even subscribe to a “newspaper”, The #hcsmanz Daily to see the interesting links produced during the discussion.
There is a #hcsmanz page which shows the last 100 tweets and links to transcripts of each meeting.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
Before I finish up I thought I would show a couple of the more interesting links placed into the conversation last night.
The first links to “Social Media – Telstra’s 3 Rs of Social Media Engagement” (PDF) and the second to an interesting slide show titled “IT, Professionalism, and Your Digital Identity” produced by Dr Stuart Morrison for fifth year medical students at Monash University in November.