Twitter and Palliative Care

It is not often that I come across a paper that I find not only interesting, but also useful. And it is even rarer for me to read a scientific paper about social media that tells me something I did not know already. As other fellows geeks will very well know, real news about social media nowadays come almost exclusively from blogs and from Twitter.

palliative-care-social-media-twitter

So I was very pleased to find Craig Nicholson’s brief paper titled Palliative care on Twitter: who to follow to get started. In it, Nicholson suggests a number of Twitter accounts to follow, if you are interested in palliative care. Not only does he list a few of them (such as @kesleeman AKA Dr Katherine Sleeman, @EAPCOnlus AKA the European Association of Palliative Care or @thewpca AKA Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance, among others), but he also describes the account in a short paragraph: who is it, and what will you get from them. 

It is very refreshing to see that despite all the social-media-hating-dinosaurs in the health care world, there is still a minority of e-pioneers getting good publications out there, and this is one of them.

If you are new to Twitter and interested in palliative care, this is the paper you need to read.

The use of social media to recruit participants in cancer care research

My colleague Marta Wanat and are presenting a poster on the Use of social media to recruit participants in cancer care research to the International Psycho-Oncology Society IPOS 2013. For those of you not attending the conference, you can find the PDF of the poster here.
I really enjoyed working on this project, and we would be very happy to hear your views via Twitter:
– Marta:  @marta_wanat
– Carolina: @ehealth_CCC
You can also see below the references for the poster:
1. Department of Health. (2012). National cancer patients’ experience survey programme. 2012/13.
2. Ramo, D. E., & Prochaska, J. J. (2012). Broad Reach and Targeted Recruitment Using Facebook for an Online Survey of Young Adult Substance Use. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 14(1)
3. Reed, E., Simmonds, P., Haviland, J., & Corner, J. (2012). Quality of life and experience of care in women with metastatic breast cancer: a cross-sectional survey. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 43(4), 747-758.
4. Steinhauser, K. E., Clipp, E. C., Hays, J. C., Olsen, M., Arnold, R., Christakis, N. A., . . . Tulsky, J. A. (2006). Identifying, recruiting, and retaining seriously-ill patients and their caregivers in longitudinal research. Palliative Medicine, 20(8), 745-754.