Using Twitter in undergraduate medicine – case study #fluscenario Dr Ellie Hothersall Theme Lead for Public Health Deputy Convenor Systems in Practice Locum Consultant in Public Health

Epidemiology Why Who When What How (Evaluation)

Public Health is “common sense” Easy Concepts rather than facts Hard to assess Difficult to get engagement from majority

The solution? Get ‘em while they’re young Try to develop conversations not teach facts Make it relevant and engaging

Purpose of #fluscenario To introduce you to pandemic ‘flu and emergency planning To develop an online learning conversation (To understand there is more to public health than drinking water and inequalities) (To understand how social media will influence your professional life)

#fluscenario Based on previous work by nhssm.org Original scenarios written by Mr Alex Talbott and Dr Chloe Sellwood Twitter chat with Social Media emphasis Easy to tweak to student focus

Outline Phase 1 Background Preparation Phase 2 Early outbreak Communication and risk Phase 3 Late outbreak Prevention and mitigation Phase 4 Wrap up Lessons learned

What happened? 2,987 Tweets using the hashtag #fluscenario Contributions from staff, students, others Mean number of Tweets per student was 13.8 (range 1-88). Peak Twitter activity was in the first 12 hours, with >1,000 Tweets within 8 hours of launching the first scenario.

Evaluation “did not understand the point of the exercise” “waste of time” “I enjoyed using twitter as a new way of teaching and I feel like I learnt a lot from the opportunity to discuss the flu scenario with my peers.”

“Whooping cough: Three more babies die in outbreak #fluscenario” “Reading about the emergence of multidrug- resistant TB and automatically relating this to the spread of #fluscenario. Hello Library Weekends.”