Post-trauma: healthcare practitioners use social media during times of political tension

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe approach of context collapse and the notion of unintentional context collisions are of importance to scholars of social media. Israeli public hospitals are a particularly suitable venue for studying these topics, as they employ both Jewish and Arab practitioners, who care for both Jewish and Arab patients amid an ongoing violent conflict. In-depth interviews were conducted with 50 managers and healthcare practitioners (physicians and nurses), both Jewish and Arab, employed at 11 public hospitals in Israel. We found that despite hospitals managements’ instructions to avoid political discourse, it erupts nonetheless whenever the conflict escalates. Fearing damage to professional relations and care of patients, political discourse spills over into social media, where political opinions are expressed mostly by Arab practitioners and stereotypical attitudes against Arabs are expressed mostly by Jewish ones. Our study exemplifies the usefulness of the context collapse approach—and specifically unintentional context collisions—to work organizations and all the more so to healthcare organizations.