Seven steps to mHealth shareability

Seven steps to mHealth shareability

by | Oct 17, 2014 | #mHabitat, NHS stuff, social media | 0 comments

We’re not always great at sharing stuff in the NHS. And if we do want to share stuff there can be lots of barriers that get in the way.  Of course there are all sorts of circumstances in which it’s right to not share (personal confidentiality being an obvious one) but what about when sharing is a way to improve what you do and how you do it? The idea of shareability is something we’re thinking about a lot in the mHealthHabitat programme.  Starting with a blank canvas has been an opportunity to try out new ways of doing stuff and make use of digital tools which can help us work smarter and more openly. Sharing with each other as a team (we have no office base) is critical to getting things done; sharing our learning beyond the team is an important part of enabling us achieve our purpose of creating a habitat in Leeds where mHealth can flourish. We haven’t got it quite right yet but we are busy building up the shareability factor as we go, and having a proper team now in place means we have a few more hands and heads to make this happen. Here are seven ways in which we are experimenting with being more sharey: Blogging it – we set up a blog as quickly as possible after we got off the blocks in January so that we had a web-based home for the habitat. We are not only capturing learning in bite-size blog post chunks for ourselves, but also making it available for anyone else who might be interested in what...
My tribe – feeling connected through social media

My tribe – feeling connected through social media

by | Oct 28, 2013 | mental health, PhD, social media | 7 comments

In my research interviews the notion of feeling connected, and finding ‘my tribe’ has been a common theme. I’m very grateful to Trish Hurtubise, founder and co-editor of the web site Mental Health Talk, for sharing her experiences of social media in this guest post. A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Seth Godin) I didn’t talk about my experience with psychosis.  It was the one part of my mental health history I judged so harshly I projected my stigma onto others. When I came to realize this, I did what anyone would do in my position and started a blog.  I wanted to ‘come out’ about psychosis to the blogsphere. The myth about starting a blog debunked I added my account on WordPress and published a few posts.  Then I waited.  And I waited some more. I was perplexed.  I truly believed if you started a blog, people would find you and comment. ‘If you build it, they will come’ rung in my head. Then I learned you actually have to let people know you’re blogging whether it is by word of mouth, optimizing for search engines, guest blogging, becoming part of the madosphere communities, promoting via social media – or all of the above. I didn’t revamp my approach by doing all of this in the beginning,...

Blog yourself well – why mental health services should support citizen journalism

by | Mar 24, 2012 | mental health | 1 comment

Last week saw the launch of Leeds’ first blog about mental health and wellbeing in Leeds. It is called Leeds Wellbeing Web: your voice on keeping well in Leeds. The purpose of the blog is to provide a space where people can contribute information, stories, pictures or films about places and activities in Leeds which help maintain their wellbeing. The blog aims to encourage us to think more positively and proactively about mental health and wellbeing. It’s about giving people a voice to tell their own stories, and the story of their city, through their own eyes. It an open resource which anyone with mental health difficulties can contribute to. The idea for the blog was conceived by Katie Brown and then supported and developed by a number of individuals and organisations in Leeds who were committed to the idea of creating a space where people can share information and ideas about mental health and wellbeing in the city. The idea of citizen journalism isn’t a new one. Its principles include open participation and communal evaluation. A blog is just a starting point. Each post is refined and developed through subsequent comments. Knowledge is produced collectively and collaboratively. There is generally a social motivation rather than a commercial one. Alex Bruns in his book Blogs, Wikipedia. Second life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) has an interesting chapter on citizen journalism that’s worth a read. He introduces the notion of produsage where the line between production and consumption is blurred. Bruns argues that citizen journalism represents a shift from mainstream commercial news journalism where the article tends to...