engleski

Social media use, habits and attitudes toward e- professionalism among medicine and dental medicine students: a quantitative cross-sectional study

Aim: To describe and compare social media (SM) use by medical and dental students. Also to assess and compare differences in their attitudes on e- professionalism and to determine their opinion on potentially unprofessional behavior and posts. Methods: We performed a quantitative cross- sectional questionnaire study on the use of SM and attitudes about e- professionalism of students in the School of Medicine and the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Results: Of the 714 collected responses, 698 were included in the final analysis (411 medical and 287 dental students). The most commonly used SM were Facebook (99%) and Instagram (80.7%). Unprofessional content was recognized by both groups. Most interesting significant differences about what they consider unprofessional posts were determined for posts with patient photos (61% dental vs. 89.8% medical), interaction with a patient not revealing any personal identifiable information (23% dental vs. 41.8% medical) and critical comments about faculty (53% dental vs. 39.7% medical). Dental students are more open to communication through SM than medical students (39.7% dental vs. 16.3% medical), would accept (41.5% dental vs. 12.2% medical) and have accepted (28.2% dental vs. 5.6% medical) friend requests/follows/tracks from patients more readily, and even sent friend requests/follows/tracks their patients (5.2% dental vs. 1.2% medical). Conclusion: Awareness of e-professionalism is high for both student groups. Dental students are more desensitized to visual representations of patients, and more prone to SM patient interaction, making them potentially more at risk of unprofessional behavior than medical students are.

social media ; e-professionalism ; students ; medicine ; dental medicine ; medical students ; dental medicine students

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