By Boms Joshua (11/8/21)
The present era is characterized by the vibrant and rapid evolution of communication technologies. Communication has transcended from the more traditional method where phone calls, messages, and emails once predominated to a new pattern of communication now facilitated by tweets, likes, status posts on media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tick-tok, and Whatsapp to mention a few. Social media is pervasive in today’s world, rapidly evolving and dominantly influencing people’s daily habits and behavior, including the healthcare landscape.
Through Social media, there are new ways of providing people with health information. Consequently, the way healthcare professionals, pharmacists included work and provide services for their clients is greatly influenced by social media. More so, it has also been an avenue through which young pharmacists increase their knowledge, efficiency, communication with patients and colleagues, and marketing as well.
Interestingly, young pharmacists around the world are well aware of social media, they understand the impact of this medium of communication and intelligently utilize social media to improve the care offered to patients, boost health outcomes, public health promotion and promote the role of the pharmacy profession in health care delivery. For instance, many young pharmacists utilize the Whatsapp platform to communicate with peers about their professional work and share best practices between colleagues.
Health-related images providing patient education on several health issues and recent research in pharmacy are notably shared on Instagram — a popular photo-sharing application. Facebook also has been used to communicate with patients and facilitate medication management discussions. Numerous young pharmacists globally host pages on Facebook through which they engage with their local community to promote their products and services as well as offer timely counseling and medicines information services.
An important area where young pharmacists have leveraged the wide reach of social media is by using it as an avenue to debunk misleading health information. Furthermore, healthcare interventions via the internet have shown great potential in getting hard-to-reach populations to recruit and retain them in impactful lifestyles change networks such as programs on smoking cessation, substance misuse, hypertension, diabetes, weight loss, and a host of others.
Through these innovative initiatives hosted by young pharmacists on social media, people who fall in these hard-to-reach populations have easy access to pharmacists and receive useful health tips and advice. These steps immensely contribute to improve disease prevention and enable early intervention. Encouragingly, several reports show that participants prefer online health intervention over face-to-face sessions. This has boosted the online delivery of exclusive sexual and reproductive health interventions including reminders to take the antiviral medication in HIV-positive patients, promotion of condom use, healthy sexual practices, and contraceptives by pharmacists.
In the aspect of mental health, many people in need of mental health support turn to the internet for possible solutions, supporting suggestions that online social networking sites could be an effective means of offering professional and peer support to vulnerable and isolated patients. Subsequently, patients with mental health disorders who find it difficult to engage in face-to-face peer support groups can be reached via social media. Additionally, there are propositions that social media could be utilized by pharmacists in public emergencies and crises management.
In spite of the obvious beneficial opportunities for health promotion presented by social media, there are challenges with using social media. Social media could be poor at tailoring information to specific patients due to the population approach. In addition, there are concerns about the accuracy and appropriateness of information found online which could have fatal effects arising from uninformed and dangerous decisions taken by patients due to the inappropriate information gotten. Consequently, young pharmacists utilizing social media to advance health should consider alternatives if patients ignore information via the chosen social media platform and also consciously promote evidence-based information to patients online.
References
1. Philip C., Reem K. Digital Media in Pharmacy Public Health. 2016;4(2). doi: 10.15406/ppij.2016.04.00069
2. Bell M, Douglas J, Cutts C. How pharmacy’s adoption of social media can enhance patient outcomes. Integrated Pharmacy Research and Practice. 2014;3:39–47 doi.org/10.2147/IPRP.S42774
3. Abroms LC, Gold RS, Allegrante JP. Promoting Health on Social Media: The Way Forward. Health Education & Behavior. 2019;46(2_suppl):9S-11S. doi:10.1177/1090198119879096
