Hannah Mountford
Assistant to Director of Services and Community
05 November 2018
Joan Pons Laplana kindly took the time to deliver a webinar called “The Power of Social Media” to our community members. Joan has been a nurse for over 20 years, and is now a clinical fellow at NHS Digital. Joan is passionate about empowering both staff and patients; he is a champion for using social media in healthcare, and wants to inspire others to embrace it. Joan has won a number of awards for his innovative approach to healthcare, including the Nursing Times Nurse Tweeter of Year 2014, and the BJN “Nurse of the Year” Award 2018.
After being introduced by Kylie, Joan started the webinar by discussing some of the issues around how the NHS shares and communicates with both staff and the public. Joan shared that within a busy NHS workplace, despite the associated issues of missed emails and inbox backlog, email still remains the main method of communication and sharing across organisations. Joan feels that many NHS Communications teams would benefit in engaging with frontline staff, and that even the best campaign can fail if it does not reach the intended audience.
Why go social?The use of social media has massively increased over the past decade; people connect to social media multiple times a day, and almost 60% of smartphone users don’t go an hour without checking their phones. For young people, social media plays an even greater role in their day to day lives. Joan then showed us a short video called “The Social Media Revolution 2017”, which shared further statistics about social media use worldwide, including:
Social media has allowed people to connect with others on a global scale; we no longer work in silos, and we can organise our lives from the palm of our hands. However, despite this development, the NHS has not yet kept pace with change, and Joan believes that this needs to change; “ The question isn’t ‘Do we need to do social media’, it should be ‘How well are we going to do social media?’ ” Joan went on to discuss how using social media has changed how he works and cares for people. He feels that it has opened a lot of doors for him, and has put him in contact with great projects and people. Social media has given Joan a platform to share his passion leading him to meet important individuals in the healthcare sector, speak at large rallies and conferences, and even appear on television. Joan feels that if it were not for the extended reach he has gained from an active social media presence, then he wouldn’t have been able to do any of this. Although social media has come about through developments in technology, Joan strongly believes that social media is about the people “behind the screen” and the connections and relationships they are able to make through sharing and networking with others. Another great bit of advice from Joan is to make use of data analytics about your social media accounts. This allows you to see who you are reaching, what sort of posts are more viewed compared to others etc. This can help you to improve how you use social media for your campaigns; using social media to its full potential allows you to reach a much larger audience, especially if it goes viral! Framing your projects
| Click image to enlarge #FloManiaJoan created the hashtag #FloMania whilst working as the telehealth lead at Derbyshire Community Health Services. #FloMania continues to be used when sharing Flo news, and is used both nationally and internationally, helping Flo users discover, share and connect with other Flo users more easily. “ Social Media is a very powerful tool, that if used correctly, has endless possibilities. Never underestimate the power of twitter. ” |