Summary
Imagine: Like a murmuration … an interprofessional academic health professions community leverages an ongoing social media challenge – to promote ONE evidence-based resource – to continually improve impact on consumer knowledge.
Training Gap: Health educators chiefly fail to implement the Clinical & Population Health Curriculum recommendation to leverage civic-engaged learning and social media to promote evidence-based resources – interprofessionally.
Aim: Civic-engaged educators & learners (anywhere, anytime) could increase consumer awareness of & demand for best practices by promoting ONE trusted insomnia resource – SleepEZ (a free digital CBT-I tool) as they compete to score the most social media influence.
Pilots To Date: Communication educators have demonstrated how it was ‘easy, fun, & popular’ for their civic-engaged learners to develop & pilot a health-related competition.
Next Steps: Let’s show how educators from more than 1 health profession (public health, sleep medicine, nurse practitioners, communication, psychology, etc) could easily collaborate to sustain an inter-professional social media competition. Help pilot ‘Speak Up for Insomnia’ and let the inter-professional games begin!
Do No Harm?
Competent clinicians inform patients about what works and where to find it (Wagner, 1998). Yet, millions of insomnia sufferers have never heard of CBT-I (the gold standard) or where to find it?
Think about how many unknowingly divert their time, effort, and money to misguided solutions … including sleeping pills! They then potentially compound the original problem, insomnia, with substance use dependence.
ONE MESSAGE … “Ask your doctor” … repeated over and over again … has been very effective to inform consumers (and their doctors) about sleeping pills.
Schools of health professions are supposed to teach how to leverage social media for health promotion – using civic-engaged interprofessional training – according to the Clinical Prevention & Population Health Curriculum. However, few do!
That’s why, as a former medical psychology course director, an academic sleep clinic member, and a lifelong learner, I’ve been working on a way for us to train together to be world-class health influencers.
A Proposed Solution
Teaming up with leading educators, we’ve run several pilots showing how we could build civic-engaged training to promote health together over different classes and semesters.
Distinguished Professor Gary Creps at GMU suggested that we show educators how it could be fun, easy, & popular (lessons learned from the VERB campaign) to sustain a health communication campaign, via civic-engaged learning across classes and semesters.
Outsourced online practicum
Rather than add Quality Improvement (QI) courses to existing curricula, hundreds of clinical programs require their students to enroll online at the Open School of the IHI. Healthcare learners from all over the world take the Open Practicum in which they practice skills they learn online. This is service-learning. Their hands-on practice (which is their service) – conducting a QI project – improves actual local healthcare delivery.
ONE Social Practicum
Likewise, we propose developing the ONE (Open Networked Education) Social Practicum to train service-learners how to interprofessionally leverage social media to promote health as well as build their online presence and influence. Learners would serve by sharing what they learn in their healthcare programs with the public (e.g., translate journal articles, tell patient success stories, review apps) on health topic Hubs (e.g., insomnia, substance use, chronic pain, obesity).
Students in the ONE Social Practicum for Insomnia would learn to (1) post about ‘what works’ and where to find it for insomnia (see sample post – sharing a conference poster), (2) curate and comment on other posts on the Insomnia Hub, (3) share their posts on other social media networks, (4) refer their patients to posts on the Hub, and (5) evaluate their impact.
Using the Jigsaw principle, the Practicum would teach interprofessional digital communication. Sharing knowledge in Jigsaw teams, people of diverse backgrounds have learned to ‘play well together’ (even in healthcare).
Furthermore, the ONE Social Practicum for Public Health could encourage students to use community-engaged scholarship to try to improve community health via public health communication campaigns on topical Hubs and to publish their findings. Health communication capstone projects, for instance, could test messages to boost demand for what works.
ONE intercollegiate competition?
Schools of Public Health could lead intercollegiate competitions to improve community health. They could compete to engage other health programs to leverage the ONE Social Practicum and networked topical Hubs (Fitness, Well-Being, Sleep, etc.) to be the most fit or to have the most well-being campus.
In 2010 – 2011, four George Mason University Communication courses (and Starbucks) began to pilot March Madness for Total Fitness – ways to develop such a competition. And, over 40 Directors of Clinical Psychology programs said they’d participate. For sleep, perhaps we could partner with Arianna Huffington and build on the Sleep Revolution College Tour she began in April 2016.
Call to action
Educators … are you preparing your students to be network literate enough to be found or be an influencer in the health information stream that is predicted by Kaiser Permanente’s CEO to be delivered to patients by phone … on-demand?
Are your students prepared to “make social media a standard of care” in health promotion, the stated goal of the Mayo Social Media Health Network?
Isn’t it time to create the ONE Social Practicum so we can all learn and serve together? From anywhere, educators could integrate the ONE Social Practicum for hands-on interprofessional training into any course. Learners would serve by promoting health via their own Hub posts and social media. Curators would spotlight the best posts – on open networked topical Hubs. Public Health leaders could blend service learning and community-engaged scholarship to build health communication campaigns. Capstone projects could sustain annual health competitions among communities.
Will you and your students help us promote what works for insomnia? Please share your thoughts below or contact DrCary@mac.com.
Meredith Cary, PsyD has over 20 years experience in academic health centers, is a member of the Mayo Social Media Network, the Institute for Health Improvement I-CAN, Societies for Participatory Medicine, Health Psychology, and Media Psychology and Technology, and is the behavioral sleep consultant to the Sleep Center at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC. Disclosure: Dr. Cary is a donor of the Neuroscience Knowledge Network – a non-profit social enterprise for open access in knowledge sharing.
