Guest Post: Social Media Survey

This is a guest post from Dr. Jon Otter, an epidemiologist focused on Infection Prevention and Control at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London. Jon has a degree in Microbiology and a PhD in epidemiology. His research interests include the epidemiology of MRSA, CDI and MDR-GNR, the role of contaminated surfaces in transmission, and molecular typing methods including whole genome sequencing. If you're interested in reading more of Jon's excellent musings, he's a blogger at the Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control blog.

Social media (in all its guises) is being used increasingly in our personal and professional lives. The advent of social media brings with it a number of challenges (time-consuming, unhelpful interactions, new liabilities) but also some important potential benefits for healthcare professionals and patients (principally unique opportunities for reaching colleagues and patients). I've been asked to do a talk at ECCMID in Amsterdam next month on the use of social media among healthcare professionals. I was able to find some reasonable data on the use of social media among scientists, but I could find very little data on the use of social media among healthcare professionals in general, and IPC/micro/ID folks in particular. So, I've produced a simple survey to fill this gap, and ask that you share the link (https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/KWYMDPM) with your colleagues so that they can complete it too. It is important that the survey is circulated outside of social media channels, for obvious reasons! I’ll be including the results of the survey in my ECCMID talk, and will make the slides available afterwards here. Many thanks to the Controversies bloggers for the opportunity to tell you about this survey.

(Editor's note: Survey takes 30 seconds so please help Jon out if you can, Thanks!)