Should the health sector be on Twitter?

Should health services, departments, organisations and other players in the health sector be on Twitter?

It’s a no brainer, I reckon. I was a late convert but am now a fully-fledged evangelist. Twitter has greatly enhanced my access to interesting and useful content from a variety of sources. It’s a very handy aggregator and disseminator. Croakey’s reach is slowly expanding thanks in large part to Twitter.

I imagine Twitter will also yield plenty of interesting research papers down the track, eg its impact on health behaviours and knowledge, media coverage, and health practice, policy and political process ETC. I’d love to see an audit of key Twitterers in the health sector, for example. Who are they – commercial, public health, government, individual service providers, etc?

But how to do it? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a short guide for its staff, explaining Twitter, how it works, and how staff may use it. It also stresses the importance of evaluating the use of Twitter in public health campaigns etc.

You can download the guide from this NPR blog about it, here.

On related topics:

• Twitter’s

• For those with an interest in media reporting of health and science, and, on a similar theme, a toolkit to help journalists

• Some reflections on health journalism by Gary Schwitzer of the Health News Review blog