engleski

Defining potentially unprofessional behavior on social media for health care professionals: mixed methods study

Background: Social media (SM) presence among healthcare professionals (HCPs) is ubiquitous and largely beneficial for their personal and professional lives. New standards are forming in the context of e-professionalism, which are loosening the predefined older and offline terms. With these benefits also come dangers, with exposure to evaluation on all levels from peers, superiors and the general public, as witnessed in the #medbikini affair. Objective: Objectives of this study are: a) to develop an improved coding scheme (SMePROF coding scheme) for the assessment of unprofessional behavior on Facebook (FB) of medical/dental students and faculty, b) to compare reliability between coding schemes used in previous researches and SMePROF coding scheme, c) to compare gender-based differences for the assessment of the professional content on FB, d) to validate the SMePROF coding scheme, and e) to assess the level of and to characterize online professionalism on publicly available FB profiles of medical/dental students and faculty. Methods: A search was performed via a new FB account using a systematic probabilistic sample of students and faculty in the University of Zagreb School of Medicine and School of Dental Medicine. Each profile was subsequently assessed with regard to professionalism based on previously published criteria, and compared using the SMePROF coding scheme, developed for this study. Results: Inter- coder reliability (ICR) shows an increase when the SMePROF coding scheme was used for the comparison of gender-based coding results. Results show an increase in the gender-based agreement of the final codes for the category professionalism, from 85% in the 1st phase to 96.2% in the 2nd phase. Final results of the 2nd phase show there was almost no difference between female and male coders for coding potentially unprofessional content for students (2.9% vs. 2.5%), nor for coding unprofessional content for students (4.6% vs. 5.4%). Comparison of definitive results between the 1st and 2nd phase, indicate an understanding of online professionalism, with unprofessional content being very low, both for students (4.1% vs. 5.8%) and faculty (4.0% vs. 0.0%). For assessment of the potentially unprofessional content, we observe four times decrease using the SMePROF rubric for students (11.7% vs. 2.9%) and five times decrease for faculty (24.0% vs. 4.2%). Conclusions: SMePROF coding scheme for assessing professionalism of HCPs on FB is a validated and more objective instrument, not affected by the gender of the coders. This research emphasizes the role that context plays in the perception of unprofessional and potentially unprofessional content, and provides insight into the existence of different sets of rules for online and offline interaction, that marks behavior as e-(un)professional. The level of e-professionalism on FB profiles available for public viewing of medical/dental students and faculty has shown a high level of understanding of e-professionalism.

professionalism ; e-professionalism ; internet ; social media ; social networking ; medicine ; dental medicine ; health care professionals ; students ; faculty

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