engleski

Doctor-patient Interactions on SNS among Doctors of Medicine and Dental Medicine

Communication between doctors and patients is a specific form of communication and it is of great interest for medical and dental profession as well as for broader society. Social networks sites (SNS) are part of everyday life for a large number of medical professionals and a large part of online communication is now conducted over SNS. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether and to what extent doctors of medicine (MD) and doctors of dental medicine (DMD) interact with patients on SNS and to determine if there are differences in doctor-patient interactions between these two medical professions. Quantitative cross sectional questionnaire study was conducted on a convenient sample of all Croatian MDs and DMDs, from February to May 2021. A total of 1013 questionnaires were collected, out of which 753 entered the analysis as SNS users. The results show that both MDs and DMDs had interactions with patients on SNS. In sample, 42% of them visited the profile of their patient or patient’s family, where DMDs did that statistically significantly more often than MDs (60.6% vs 33.3%, P<.01). The most reported reason for visiting a profile was “curiosity” (77%), almost twice as much as “gathering information for medical care” (38%) or “social communication” (37%). Both MDs and DMDs received “friend requests” from patients or their family (72%), where DMDs significantly more often accepted those requests (U=22636.5, P<.01). An important difference found between MDs and DMDs is in initiation of “friend requests” towards patients, where DMDs had done that significantly more (15% vs 3, 4%, P<.01). These results show that doctor-patient interactions exist on SNS and that MDs and DMDs differ in the proportion of connecting with patients. It also means that it is necessary to further consider the balance between the dangers and advantages of SNS, and find a safe way to facilitate doctor-patient interactions on SNS.

social network sites ; e-professionalism ; medicine ; dental medicine

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