Social networking and biomedicine and health

Been learning a lot about social media from following 11andahalfthings. This week was all about social networking. I've been having fun getting to grips with twitter.

Now for Thing 4 I've been exploring examples of social networking being used by researchers or academics in biomedicine and health, and by clinicians. I decided quite quickly that the search facility in Facebook has a lot to be desired! To focus my search I tried looking for groups on Facebook related to UCL and came up with a few different types of examples:

Student groups
Students are big users of facebook. I found lots of student groups just from UCL! One example is the UCL Neuroscience Reading Group, a closed group for any Masters students from UCL's Neuroscience and Phonetics & Linguistics departments.

Academic departments
An example is the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience members, a closed group for anyone who attends, attended, works or worked in this department.

Recruitment for studies
And here's a real life experience example. Just recently a friend posted a message to all her friends on facebook. She was going to use a questionnaire as part of a study for her PhD and needed people on whom to trial-run the questionnaire. By posting it to all her contacts on facebook she was able to quickly and easily get feedback and everyone could see each other's comments and contribute to a discussion on the questionnaire.

It seems she's not alone. I came across quite a few Facebook profiles set up to recruit participants for studies, such as one from UCL's Dept of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology recruiting people to participate in a study on alcohol craving. And in the clinical context, seems Facebook is widely used for recruiting participants in clinical trials, eg. a Canadian trial on smoking cessation.

Other examples
There's an interesting article I found in Nature on how social media has increased public awareness of issues arising from research and consequently has put public pressure on research funding bodies as people put together support groups and air their views on Facebook.

I've always felt that Facebook is something that should be kept for non-professional activities, and maybe it is in terms of the use of a personal profile. But the groups feature allows for easy interaction and networking amongst like-minded people or colleagues and could be a useful tool in this context.

Interestingly I wasn't getting many hits for big organisations relating to biomedicine or health when searching Facebook, so I took a look at some of their websites to see if I could find 'Follow us on facebook' links. Perhaps they share my feeling about Facebook being for social purposes but many don't seem to have a facebook page, although lots share their news on Twitter. Eg: MRC, Department of Health, NICE, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.