Social media and the nursing profession

As the Communication Director for ONIG, I was extremely pleased to see a significant portion of the Fall 2011 issue of the College of Nurses of Ontario’s  ‘The Standard’ dedicated to discussion surrounding the use of social media in nursing.  Kamini Kalia, Robert Fraser, and Joyce Fox are all showcased in the feature article of the edition as being nurses who use social media technologies in an innovative fashion to distribute information and knowledge within healthcare.  Both Kalia and Fraser are active ONIG members and have been highly involved with using social technologies in their respective nursing roles.  A quick Google search of their names will provide you with a small example of how they have leveraged their professional lives through the use of social technologies.  

As a truly consumer-centric communication modality, the use of social media in healthcare has only now started to emerge as a functional potential in conjunction with traditional clinical informatics and health ICT systems.  The next few years will be a dynamic period of evolution for the informatics and eHealth discipline here in Ontario – we here at ONIG plan to do our best to ‘keep up’ to Kalia, Fraser, and Fox.

^RB