A Tweeting Hospital and Kidney Patient
The Case of the tweeting Kidney Patient
has casued a small whirlpool of a debate happening. The summary of the case is:
a kidney patient was tweeting about their kidney transplant on twitter
the hospital monitored the tweets, and passed one comment onto a consultant when it was clear the patient hadn’t understood something about the treatment (the consultant had never used twitter before)
The consultant then brought the subject up with the patient at the next face to face meeting
Both the consultant and patient were embarrassed but the patient was also grateful to have access to a consultant directly and help.
Here is the debate: is this Ethical? Interference? A good outcome? Invasion of privacy? ?What were the consultant/hospital thinking? ?Opportunity for online-education? Is ‘surveillence med’ socially unacceptable?
The comments are worth a read: for example Anne Marie Cunningham, a GP and medical educator, is questioning whether this response was an invasion of patient privacy (I hope Anne Marie does one of her thoughtful blog posts on the case), @snippetphysther, a physical therapist, thinks by using twitter the patient chose to make their experience to be public.
My take, as a non-clinician, is also that tweets are in the public domain and with proper use, good education for all can come of a dialogue online, as long as personal details are not included. The Mayoclinic’s use of social media may be one way of seeing this in action. Nevertheless , we have had this debate before (in the case of the sexual health nurse using social media to contact patients) and I’m not sure how I would I feel if a hospital/clinic I had just attended were monitoring my twitter stream. Would I change what I was sharing online I wonder?
IAmReedSmith posted the following chart: Who from the hospital should tweet
These are small numbers but it shows that, in this particular population and not necessarily representative, 55% of patients and family members would like nurses and caregivers to tweet. On the flip side, does a nurse wish to be inundated with questions from patients? Some do as in the case of Zena the Sexual Health Nurse.
For more on this subject see The case of the Twittering Kidney Patient by Dan O’Connor
As an avid blogger and social media user, with Cystic Fibrosis, who just underwent a double lung transplant- here is my opinion. The online transplant community is HUGE. People that participate in it are pretty open and well-aware that anything they put online will be read by a) everyone they know as they are usually dying b) all their social media contacts c)random with their disease or transplant type looking to support or criticize d) anyone who they write about.
The hospital would not have monitored her tweets and blog if she hadn’t mentioned them by name (the hospital, doctors, or staff). So- after that point, its fair game. I was contacted by both of the hospitals I was working with, by their PR departments, to thank me for my blogging. That is because, however, I only mention names when I’m saying something nice, and never mentioned my hospital until it was “out” on fb and some other sites due to the popularity of my site, and the crossover in my readership between real-life friends and internet friends.
Great article!!
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Heidi Allen Reply:
November 11th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Thanks Beth! Great to hear from someone who has undergone transplant and uses social media. It’s one thing for us to give our opinion from the ‘outside’ but quite another to read this from you. Thanks for taking the time to comment – and I like your Cystic Gal blog!
Heidi
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Thanks for checking out my blog. I’m gonna spend some time snoopin around yours tonight!
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