COMMUNITY...

Community is " a group of people sharing religion, race or profession"  is what my dictionary says ! This is a very short and succinct way of putting it and whilst it is accurate I believe that it is not the full story.  Personally I think that this does not do the concept of community justice at all.   Community to me means a group of like minded people sharing knowledge, experience. ideas and thoughts in order to support each other and develop and to progress the community as a whole.  For a while now I have been talking about nurse community and the sharing of ideas and knowledge - the way our profession used to back in the day when we all worked, ate, slept and existed together under one roof.  Today things are different and we all have increasingly busier lives and nurses are no longer just nurses but wives and husbands, mothers and fathers and so much more.

The reason I started to blog and to tweet was because I felt that in some way nursing needs to return to being a community and i very much see that social media can facilitate this around our busy lives.  I am truly passionate about social media bringing nurses together and want to share this with every nurse I meet.  I am very lucky that the lovely people at Newcross believe in this too and are helping me to do this by supporting and developing the nurse community initiative that is NurChat. http://www.nurchat.blogspot.com/  For those of you who don't know NurChat is a twitter chat for nurses to discuss and exchange professional ideas .. it is driven by the nursing community for the nursing community.  the first chat took place earlier this week, and it was a fabulous get together of a wide variety of nurses and I truly felt that our nurse community had been re born!

But a Nursing Times blog by Anne Cooper got me thinking ....

http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-practice/clinical-specialisms/educators/do-you-use-social-media/5033488.article

 ...the blog was all about Annes journey in discovering social media, and I could very much see comparison between my own journey and Annes.  However it was the comments that followed the blog that set me alight - an anonymous person commented that  it's was a shame there weren't more examples in the blog of where nurses are using social media to improve their skills or work and suggested that maybe the Nursing Times just wanted to talk about the things that they do in social media.  There were then two subsequent comments by Pam Nelmes and Nadine Woogara that then gave examples of where social media is working well. Further down the comments it was great to see the author of the blog -Anne- comment and say follow me on twitter and follow my followers !!! How brilliant !!

And so ...I think that I had my very own "light bulb" moment - Social Media is just in it's very infancy for nurses and we all have our own agendas for community ... so are we truly sharing???  What we need more of is the "follow my followers" ...  in a community everyone has value and ideas and knowledge and this needs to be found before it can be shared .... so with that in mind here are the people in social media that give me alot of value, please follow them as I am sure they will do the same for you.  (in no particular order)


@PamNelmesFoH  - a truly inspirational follow, tweets lots of nursing info
@TheStrokeAssoc - lots of good stroke info
@nhssm - lots of info on social media within the NHS
@anniecoops - a wonderful blog writer and provides brilliant inspiration
@HCANurse_Mikey - amazing tweeter who is always finding fab stuff for nurses
@NurChat - a fortnightly twitter chat for nurses
@NursingTimes - lots of news, stories, blogs and forums
@DonnaCardilloRN - writes amazing, thought provoking blogs
@NewcrossHealth - starting to do some amazing stuff for nurses
@RCNPublishing - Share info for the nursing communities benefit really well
@SuzetteWoodward -brilliant stuff to do with patient safety
@shirleyayres- tweets some really interesting things about social media
@theRCN - important to follow to keep updated
@NMCnews - very important to follow

and some nurses who I have had great discussions with :


@MacMoomin
@N1ckWarren
@katieandersonHD
@politicalnurse
@nursemaiden
@vickiafc
@nothernlass73
@Safer_ICU
@eileenshepherd
@gallowcl
@FloNursingtales
@KevinHamUoP
@Hhaylo

Please feel free to share the people you gain value from too...

Please follow this link to see the full Nursing Times blog by Anne Cooper

http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-practice/clinical-specialisms/educators/do-you-use-social-media/5033488.article

And if you want to know more about NurChat please follow this link

http://www.nurchat.blogspot.com/

Launching NurChat...

It seems such a long time since my last blog and so much has happened ...

Although I have not blogged I have been hard at work, striving to get the nurse community talking and developing a new project that aims to do this.  And now I am very proud to announce the launch of NurChat.

NurChat...

NurChat is a project that I have been working on with the lovely people at Newcross Healthcare.  NurChat is a fortnightly chat for nurses and the nursing community to discuss nursing issues, journal articles and nursing news. The chats can be accessed via searching #NurChat and will take place on every other Tuesday evening at 8pm and the date for the first chat is TUESDAY 9TH AUGUST - put it in your diary now!!

To get regular updates of the NurChat twitter chats and to find out more go to www.nurchat.blogspot.com and give NurChat a follow.

NurChat officially launched yesterday and since then I have been truly overwhelmed by all the support from the tweeting and healthcare community, it's great to see everyone coming together with a common goal in mind .... to talk!!  I would like to thank each and every one of you out there for the help and support ..and I am really looking forward to getting involved in some great discussions with you all.

See you there ...

So don't forget the first NurChat on TUESDAY 9TH AUGUST AT 8PM.  I am really excited about seeing you all there!