Richard Booth*, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Kamini Kalia, St. Joseph’s Health Care London; The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Robert Fraser, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Track: Research Presentation Topic: Web 2.0-based medical education and learning Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: LKSC Conference Center Stanford Room: Breakout Classroom Date: 2011-09-18 03:00 PM – 04:30 PM Last modified: 2011-08-12

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Background
The last decade has seen tremendous growth in the use of communication technology within healthcare. Along with the rise of various eHealth technologies during the early 2000s, the recent increased prevalence of socially-driven Internet technology (social media) has begun to impact the nursing profession in a number of salient fashions. Nursing education and practice are two areas which have been influenced by the evolving communication modalities that social media technologies can facilitate. Regardless, the nursing profession as a whole has been remarkably slow to recognize and study these new modalities of communication facilitated by the evolution of social media. The objective of this study is to outline the current state of knowledge pertaining to social media usage within the nursing profession, using two different, yet synergistic research approaches: 1) generate a traditional systematic review of Web 2.0/social media examples in the published academic literature as related to the profession of nursing; 2) capture and analyze a purposeful cross-section of current social media examples within the profession that complement or evolve the available published material. The research questions utilized for this study include: 1) what elements of social media in nursing have been explored in the literature to date? 2) how are nurses using social media functionality for professional practice that have not been studied or addressed in the literature?
Methods
Academic publications examining social media used in nursing were collected and analyzed in this study (n=54). Expository works outlining background knowledge and feature-listings were also included due to the relative newness of the topical area. Articles and studies of an interdisciplinary nature were included if the outcomes or perceptions of the nurses could be extracted separately from the results of the other participants. Non-published accounts of social media usage (n=18) were uncovered in three primary fashions: 1) the researchers’ experience or background knowledge; 2) crowd-sourcing examples from social networking sites; and 3) the use of real-time social media search engines, like Socialmention.com to monitor Internet traffic for potential examples. All study results and examples were organized thematically into three overarching categories: social, technical, and political. Subthemes, including the specific results of the studies or examples documented, were created to populate the overarching social, technical, and political categories.
Results
The integration of published and non-published accounts of social media use in nursing offers a cross-sectional outlook as to how the nursing profession is currently utilizing these technologies. The results of the study also demonstrate that the majority of social media currently used within the profession serves primarily an educational or communicative role between early adopter participants. Consumer engagement was not found as a salient theme in either the published or non-published accounts.
Conclusions
The results of this study provide a unique perspective into the current usage of social media within the profession of nursing. Further evaluation measures must be undertaken in order to ascertain the impact social media technologies can (and are) having on the nursing profession in its ability to deliver care to an increasingly digitally-connected consumer.