by Victoria | Nov 10, 2013 | mental health, NHS stuff, social media |
In October Helen shared her mental health inpatient experience, as it happened from the ward, and on the most public of platforms – Twitter. I followed her Twitter feed, was intrigued by this stream of instant feedback, and wondered if it might be perceived as a gift or a threat to an NHS Trust. I was lucky enough to have a chat with Helen about her experiences, and this post summarises our conversation: Difficult status coming up… Firstly I wondered what led to Helen choosing to make such a personal experience, which many of us would choose to keep private, so very public: Helen told me, as a regular use of Twitter it simply seemed ‘quite natural that I would carry on using Twitter’ and that she had actually made retaining her phone a condition of her admission. However, this quickly came under threat when staff attempted to confiscate it. I have previously blogged about inpatient access to smart phones and the law here. It is worth reflecting at this point how smart phones have become an essential day-to-day communication tool for many people – for Helen a text, Facebook update or tweet was infinitely preferable to a conversation on the ward payphone and an invaluable way of keeping in touch with people during a distressing period. ‘It validated me much more than my experiences on the ward’ Helen told me that initially she began tweeting her experiences out of both ‘boredom and frustration’ and to elicit the support she felt she needed and was not receiving in person from ward staff. It is telling that Helen felt she...
by Victoria | Feb 25, 2013 | mental health, NHS stuff |
Today @VanessLGarrity and I did a session with second year mental health nursing students on the topic of social media and nursing. We covered themes such as professional development and clinical practice. Here is a storify of the tweets that we encouraged using the hashtag #futureMHN in the lead up to, during and after the session. We managed to get a few students tweeting and really appreciated all the retweets and input from nurses and other supportive tweeps who were following the discussion: Sociable nursing – storify of our session with #futureMHN students We used a Prezi to deliver the session and you can find it here: Sociable nursing Prezi We were particularly struck by the extent to which social media, and its implications, aren’t yet being included in nurse training or in practice – we’re sure this will change over time we hope we’ve made a small contribution to moving things forward today....
