Abstract

Social media can be used to engage consumers in hospital service design and quality improvement (QI) activities, however its uptake may be limited by a lack of guidance to support implementation. This article presents the perceived barriers and enablers in using social media for consumer engagement derived from an interview study with public hospital stakeholders. Semi-structured interviews with 26 Australian hospital service providers and consumer representatives. Data were analysed using a deductive content analysis method. Data were collected between October 2019 and April 2020. Facebook was the platform most commonly used for consumer engagement activities. Barriers and enablers to social media-based consumer engagement were identified. The barrier themes were (1) fears and concerns; (2) lack of skills and resources for social media engagement; (3) lack of organisational processes and support; and (4) problems with social media platforms and the changing social media landscape. The enabler themes were: (1) hospitals facilitating access and use; (2) making discussions safe; (3) cultivating a social media community; and (4) building on success. Using social media to facilitate consumer engagement in hospital service design and QI activities is feasible and acceptable to service providers and consumers. Hospitals and their executives can create a supportive environment for social media-based engagement activities through developing clear governance systems and providing training and support to all users. Consumers need to be involved in co-designing social media-based activities and determining which forms of engagement are accessible and acceptable. For some consumers and service providers, barriers such as a lack of resources and distrust of social media companies might mean that social media-based engagement will be less acceptable for them. Because of this it is important that hospitals provide complementary methods of engagement (eg, face-to-face) alongside social media-based methods.

Highlights

  • Social media is becoming a feature of health and healthcare

  • To better understand and inform the implementation of social media-based consumer engagement in public hospitals, we explored the following research question: ‘What experiences and opinions do public hospital stakeholders have around the use of social media as a tool to facilitate consumer engagement in hospital service design and quality improvement (QI)?’

  • Social Media Platforms Used Based on data gathered from the websites of the 18 health service settings, public social media profiles used by the hospitals for any purpose included Facebook (n = 18), Twitter (n = 12), YouTube (n = 12), LinkedIn (n = 11), Instagram (n = 4), Patient Opinion (n = 1), and Vimeo (n = 1)

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Social media is becoming a feature of health and healthcare. The collaborative communication, user-generated content and networking which define social media[1,2] has seen it used in health for sharing information,[3,4,5,6,7] peer-to-peer connection for consumers and service providers,[5,6,7,8,9,10] and organisational data gathering.[4,6,10] A recent scoping review by members of this author team demonstrated that social media has been used as a tool for stakeholder engagement in health service design and quality improvement (QI).[11]. The majority of activities were conducted in high-income countries.[11]

Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call