Nurses, Hospitals, and Social Media: It Depends What Business You’re In

Hospitals with social media policies are not necessarily squelching their employees' right to freedom of speech. They don't want to spend time and money in court defending their public image. They already spend lots of money on marketing. They are in the business of patient care, not entertainment. So hospitals with social media polices take the position that you can post or tweet to your heart's content, but should keep in mind the following:

2016-11-21T13:14:17-05:00January 19th, 2011|career, healthcare social media, Nursing, Patients|2 Comments
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Placenta Facebook Photos: Nurse and Mommy Tribes See Student Expulsion Differently

Will patients trust that when they are anesthetized they will be treated respectfully? Will hospitals and other clinical agencies be less inclined to host students for fear of litigation over privacy? I imagine at the very least, all nursing schools are now quickly developing social media policies. The American Medical Association has one and the American Nurses Association is, I’m told, developing one.

2016-11-21T13:14:21-05:00January 12th, 2011|career, Ethics, healthcare social media, nursing perspective, students|14 Comments
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AJN Webnotes: Anatomizing Medical Errors; Insurance Rebates; Social Media and Nurses

The most popular article in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine did not tout the discovery of a novel gene, nor describe a cardiology clinical trial with a clever acronym as its title. Rather, it was the report of a case in which a surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital performed the wrong operation on a 65-year-old woman.

So begins a nicely engaging summary post at The Health Care Blog of the main points of an NEJM article describing how a medical error occurred—and yes, nurses play a major role in the story too.

Feel like your insurance company spends too much time trying to weasel you out of your money? Kaiser Health News reports today that the Affordable Care Act may soon result in a little payback, in the form of rebates:

Millions of Americans might be eligible for rebates starting in 2012 under regulations released Monday detailing the health care law’s requirement that insurers spend at least 80 percent of their revenue on direct medical care.


“I have nothing listed under my work experience, yet Facebook somehow knows where I work,” cries Not Nurse Ratched, in a post called “Latest Facebook creepiness rant.” Such surprises are worth considering for anyone who might forget that information has a life of its own on the Web. Speaking of social media and nurses, A Nurse Practitioner’s View gives a quick survey of social media networking platforms […]

2016-11-21T13:14:53-05:00November 22nd, 2010|health care policy, healthcare social media|0 Comments
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A Note on the Life Cycle of Blogs

This is just to say that we realize that personal blogs by nurses have life cycles. They wax and they wane. While a core few are updated consistently, with the occasional gap for a vacation, and live on and on, evolving their appearances or keeping the old reliable appearance, many more simply die a quiet natural death. In many cases, no one plays taps. They served their purpose, they were noticed by a few or many of us, and then they quietly grew quiet.

Sometimes the bloggers say goodbye. Sometimes they just stop as if abducted by aliens. Or by their lives, or jobs, or illness, or death, or families, or by an alter ego. Well, that last bit is just speculation. Often the blogs live on, like deserted homes with the furniture still in them, never growing dusty, never surrounded by weeds or visible decay yet somehow sad. Or not so sad: testaments to an episode in a life in which a voice was raised with humor or outrage or questioning in a solitary room with a keyboard somewhere after the kids were in bed or while the DVR recorded the latest episode of something or other or early in the morning while the plows scraped the streets of the night’s snowfall.

Some nurse bloggers are more bloggers than […]

2016-11-21T13:15:04-05:00November 5th, 2010|healthcare social media, narratives, nursing perspective|6 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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