Exploring social media usage in improving public perception on workplace violence against healthcare workers

Abstract

Workplace violence against healthcare workers has been a major social problem in many countries. A misunderstanding between patients and physicians is the primary cause of violence . The recent rise of social media offered a new communication channel between the government and the public. This study aims to explore and examine the use of social media to improve public perception about the medical workplace violence by considering a recently issued policy in China. We collected 12,250 posts before, during and after the implementation of the policy from Weibo, which is similar to Twitter. Sentiment classification and topic clustering methods were used to analyze the data. One-way ANOVA was applied to assess the changes of public sentiments over time. Results showed that the proportion of posts with negative sentiment statistically significantly decreased after the release of the policy, indicating the effectiveness of social media in improving public perception about the medical workplace violence, to a large extent. Topic clustering results regarding the policy showed that most people supported the policy. However, some believe that punishment measures contained in the policy need to be strengthened and that more attention should be paid to the hospitals and medical staffs, as well as how to effectively protect the interests of patients. Based on these findings, we suggested government to effectively and scientifically use social media to address medical workplace violence from the perspective of the public and further consider its causes in terms of both patients and medical staffs, and building an expert witness system seems to be helpful. Measures for guaranteeing the safety of medical staffs should be built by comprehensively evaluating the potential risk. These results can help governments increase the engagement of their citizens.