Yesterday on the bus .....

   

I was on the bus yesterday and I happened to overhear a conversation between two ladies. The first lady was talking about her upcoming appointment with "the specialist" and said "I telephoned the hospital and spoke to the receptionist; she stated that she wasn't trained to change appointments and I couldnt speak to anyone else as they weren’t trained to communicate with patients, she said I would have to wait and she would get back to me at some point."

The second lady pitched in" well that's ridiculous, surely everyone in a hospital should be able to communicate with patients - using a phone isn't rocket science!!"

Ok, I admit it … this wasn’t a real conversation and I wasn’t on the bus yesterday, in fact the truth is I rarely travel by bus!! However I did attend a rather interesting Social Media event yesterday where James Ainsworth Social Media Manager for SDL gave a presentation.  I was dragged along to the event as a “plus one” by another party who promised that I would find it interesting … I wasn’t convinced as it was advertised as a marketing and networking event and as a dedicated and passionate nurse I couldn’t see what I could gain…. But I am pleased to say that James Ainsworth had some very sound ideas.

The main body of the presentation was about social media monitoring (which I won’t go into) but towards the end James started to talk about how to use Social Media within an organization.  James showed a slide that said the following about why and how organizations should use Social Media:

To be loud and proud

–We do some pretty awesome stuff, let’s tell people about it

To sell

–We have some of that pretty awesome stuff I spoke about to sell

To support valuable customers

–They already know of our pretty awesome stuff but do we know what they do with it? Do they need help with handling the pretty awesome stuff?

So I thought to myself – does this have applications within healthcare?

To be loud and proud

-Yep we too have some pretty awesome stuff within healthcare that is worth telling people about

To sell

– Ok so we don’t actually “sell” our services however we do have important messages about all of our awesome stuff that we need to “sell” to our patients and the public

To support valuable customers

– Well all of customers are extremely important and our patients and I would say that some of them need a lot of support.  And yes our patients do know about the awesome stuff we are doing but are we aware about how and what they find useful? And do we know if and when they need more help?

These three things are often encompassed within healthcare as a whole but are we considering them within our Social Media remit? Are we using social media to its fullest potential? Or are we merely using it as a public information broadcasting service??

Then James came to the most important lesson of the evening when he said that Social Media shouldn’t just be a department within an organization…… Why ARE we only shaking hands with social media? We may have a social media department within our organization but more often than not it’s a single person spewing out information and dealing with any patient engagement by forwarding the info onto the correct person and then messages are relayed back. There is no instant response … which is why we all love social media so much… ask a question and it is answered immediately!  Everyone within a healthcare environment can use a phone, everyone can communicate with patients, its our business and is a key skill– why aren’t we communicating with patients the way in which they want to communicate? Why are we still sending smoke signals when our patients are using social media?

Which brings me back to my two (imaginary) ladies on the bus: In ye olden days the telephone was invented …. It laughable today to think that in order to communicate with our patients in an effective way on the telephone that we would require any level of training.  Would we not answer the phone because we were not trained to do so? Would we only have one phone within our organization with only one person trained to answer it? And given that there was only one person to use the phone would we then expect a delay in getting information out to our patient because of it?? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding NO!! So why are we doing this with Social Media?

Let’s all be Loud and Proud – why can’t we all communicate the awesome stuff we are doing in every department to our own patients?

Let’s all “sell” – why can’t we all sell our important messages to our own patients?

Let’s all support our valuable “customers” – why can’t we all use social media to communicate with our patients in the way that they communicate, lets support them through social media, lets learn lessons from what they tell us and how they interact, and lets provide them with all the help they need using our professional expertise

……and wouldn’t it be great if we could do it all at the time our patients ask for it!!!