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Assignment evaluates the benefits, challenges, & engagement of public health communication & social media

Home, - Public Health Communication and Social Media

Benefits and challenges of using social media for public health communication

With the help of the social media, the physicians can able to participate in various online communities to gain proper solution about the health care problems. The platforms of the social networking mainly used for professional networking that is highly accessible to the people and provides a more supportive environment for HCPs who are not fully specialized. The HCP crowd sourcing mainly harnesses the skills and knowledge of the community to solve fundamental problems for gathering opinions and information. The social media can also be used to gain the connection with professionals of HCPs in various third world countries with the different specialist. As said by Ventola (2018), the surgical procedures can be streamed with the help of the internet connections, and the multiple questions can be asked with the help of Facebook on the real-time basis. The social networks mainly provide new forms of communication to various channels for every HCP to get connected exchange professionally and share the medical information at the enormous amount of pace. The clinical education has been improved in a significant way with the help of social media.
But there is some major risk that is involved in social media and the first one is the poor quality of information that can be found in social media where the online sources lack the reliability and quality. The social media may be vulnerable to over conflicts and hidden that are highly incapable of interpretation. The next risk is the damage to the professional images that where the unprofessional content can be easily posted in social media. As said by Moorhead et al. (2013), the behavior needs to be constructed for the violations of the privacy in patients, relative images of the sexual intoxications and suggestiveness and it provides the huge amount of negative comments about the respective doctors, health organisation or patients. There can be the breach in the patient privacy through social media that provides huge negativity in the reputation of the health organisation.

Description of the organisation and selected social media channel

The chosen organisation that the researcher will discuss is known as the Southern Cross Healthcare which is mainly an independent of the health-oriented business in New Zealand that primarily operates in the not for profit principles, and it is one of the largest non-public healthcare organisation. The business group includes mostly the health insurance, travel insurance, private hospitals and pet insurance. The Southern Cross healthcare organisation created the separate community for the patients, doctors and employees for enhancing the communications and visibility of the organisation. As said by Antheunis, Tates & Nieboer (2013), the social media that is mainly being used by the Southern Cross healthcare organisation is Facebook and Twitter that provides various news feeds related to the services, visibility and marketing products for providing education and patient resources. The chosen social media has helped to increase the overall presence to influence the overall choices strongly and offers proper trust for the organisation. The social media also supports the pharmacies for appropriate communications with large customers groups for the conduction surveys and helping the patients to be part of the pharmacy community.
Direct patient care is possible with the help of Facebook with the help of live video feed that provides enormous benefits for Southern Cross health organisation. From the overall evidence gained from the Southern Cross, it could be found that the electronic communication with their patients for improving the overall health and care outcomes. It also helps to strengthen the advice of physicians and also enhances the overall adherence for their patients who are suffering from high chronic diseases (datacomgroup.eu. 2018). The social media provides the enormous amount of improvements like Facebook in providing healthcare information and educational resources.

The organisation engaged with the users

The Southern Cross health organisation always tries to treat their patients with the enormous amount of care and provides tremendous benefits to the patients by providing guidelines in the social networking websites. The Southern Cross utilises the social media to create global networks that can quickly spread information and also can able to mobilise the massive amount of people for improving their services towards the public health. The Southern Cross maintains a proper presence on Facebook and Twitter for tracking every tweets and news feed can able to indicate the flu outbreak and helps to share updates about appropriate information of the incidents. The Southern Cross mainly follows the Twitter posts and Facebook with the combination of location tracking technologies for gaining a rapid response to any disaster that can occur to patients. As said by Neiger et al. (2013), with the help of the news feed on Facebook, the Southern Cross mainly monitor the welfare and health of the populations.
With the help of the social media, the Southern Cross health organisation identifies mostly any occurrence of disaster management like Earthquakes or tsunami so that they can able to responds very fast to that particular location for saving the respective patients. The Southern Cross organisation mainly utilises the social media for influencing the public health goals and behaviors with the help of social reinforcements. The Southern Cross with the help of Facebook allowed the users to post the status of the organ donor in their profile. As said by Zhou et al. (2018), the Online state organ donor registry mainly experiences a tremendous amount of surge in the donor pledges due to the effect of social networking. The physicians of the Southern Cross health organisation also utilises the social media for promoting healthcare education by tweeting, recording videos, making blog posts and also participated in the various disease-specific discussion that could be discussed and can be focused on the every patient educations. The social media forums of the patients can able to join virtually in various communities and participate in the research.

Improvement required for social media engagement

For more development, the healthcare organization must engage with the patients on real time that will provide the massive amount of benefit and enables more deeper meaning full discussion that addresses the patients concerns, interests and questions in real time. The health system can able to utilises social networking pages for encouraging the study of the patients. There must include the proper amount of collaboration among the physicians. It can be employed to promote the physician's cooperation and alignment. As said by Chan et al. (2018), the social network helps the physicians to communicate and work to overcome all the challenges that are mainly being posed with eh help of the work environment.
The next major requirement to increase the social media engagement is preventive health initiatives and supporting the population because the social media sites are highly related to the public communication platforms that could reach the full breadth of individuals, and it would be used for understanding the marketing tactics. The health organisation also utilises the social media as the platform for the distribution of various information to understand the diseases, public health issues and health conditions of every patient. The providers need to maintain the overall trust by keeping the global relationships and establishing the presence of every professional.

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