P11 - Social Media and the Impact on the Nursing Informatics Workforce  

Background: Professional organizations play a crucial role in disseminating information to their specialty groups about providing instructions on how to change behavior to mitigate risks, motivating compliance with health directives and addressing false information. Social media (SoMe) platforms are a critical tool in risk communication, providing a medium for rapid transmission of messages as well as providing the opportunity for engagement and immediate feedback

History: Over the last ten years, there has been significant growth in the utilization of different social media platforms. Current social media platforms most commonly used are LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, Facebook, and Instagram. Our organization meets quarterly to review topics and contents and coordinate final published works to the internet. The group’s current priority postings include, Talk Tuesdays, Fun Fact Fridays, Self-Care Saturdays, and membership highlights on Spotlight Sundays while ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion for all members. The critical question ahead is how effective is our current SoMe strategy and how should we proceed in the upcoming 18 months? As a result, we designed the following research question.

PICOT: Among nursing informaticians throughout the United States and Canada(P), does the use of social media (I) compared to in-person networking (C) have a greater impact on job selection, professional development, and learning opportunities (O)?

Literature review: We reviewed over 300 recently published articles in PubMed to help us design our future media strategy. Current research has demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the exposure and attention given to nurses in the global media (Peng, 2022). Other literature suggested nurses used social media as channels to gain and share information and support each other by highlighting the need for training and changes in delivery of care and redeployment. Further, social media functioned as profession-promoting channels partly sharing heroic self-representations and acknowledgment of front-line persons in the pandemic, partly by displaying critical working conditions (Glasdam, et. al, 2022). Most impressively was a recent study completed by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) that suggested the most widely used SoMe was LinkedIn (60.8%). Among the advantages of SoMe, respondents indicated the chance of being updated on recent publications (66.0%), networking (48.5%), and the availability of rare or interesting cases (47.9%) as the most useful. Regarding the disadvantages of SoMe, the respondents underlined the loss of personal contact (40.7%), the inability to get "hands-on" training (38.7%), and the lack of control regarding quality of scientific evidence (37.1%). Overall, most articles indicated that social media is increasingly used for professional purposes for scientific knowledge, networking, and case-based learning.

Way ahead: Lessons learned through this committee are anticipated to discuss a variety of issues regarding policy, training, and security involving social media and how it can be redesigned to assist all nursing informaticians and promote our efforts in a positive view. Future considerations will also include designing an online survey to facilitate feedback and utilizing forums as the our national conference to facilitate feedback to create media platforms which are helpful to the informatics community.