SCHOLARSHIP OF TWITTER IN NURSING EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Purpose: Health care reform has placed enormous challenges on nurses to reach underprivileged patients and rise to roles of leadership to inform health policy and improve care management.  This movement has placed challenges on nursing curriculum to prepare our graduate nursing students to become the nursing leaders that are essential for positive health outcomes and care delivery.  The purpose of this presentation is to introduce Twitter as one mechanism used to achieve these goals.

Background: Social media is gaining momentum as a mechanism to inform followers of advances and policies in healthcare.  Twitter in particular is flexible and easy to use, supporting its benefits for communication amongst health care organizations and leaders.  Developing nurse leaders and scholars can also benefit from this technology. This work is significant as it describes a mechanism to meet this challenge by preparing our graduate nurse leaders to use emerging technologies for scholarly information sharing and networking with a community of scholars.

Description of Best Practice: Twitter was incorporated into a Master’s level policy course to provide students with the opportunity to network with health care leaders and policy makers, and interact with unfolding policies and those in action in the legislation.  The flexibility of Twitter also afforded weeklong exchanges with invited experts in nursing policy and national health care leadership.  Twitter assignments were carefully constructed to assist students to engage in specific key concepts of health care policy and economics.

Outcomes: We observed initially a learning curve where students were either reluctant to use Twitter or needed assistance in getting set up. We developed a guide to assist students and most found this helpful. After the initial learning curve, students embraced this innovative teaching and learning method. Students commented that they had not considered Twitter for communicating with health care leaders or for staying informed toward health care policy. Successful Twitter assignments included following a nurse leader, professional organization, policy, and bills over several weeks.

Conclusions: The use of social media such as Twitter affords timely information sharing which enhances the learning process by using current information as it relates to teaching/ learning outcomes. Integration of timely information sharing within specific courses in graduate and undergraduate health care education can enhance learning by following current trends health care policy and economics and their impact on the interprofessional management of complex care populations. Currently, this innovative teaching/ learning strategy has been implemented in three (3) courses in online graduate programs focused on  the topics of health care policy and economics, quality and safety, and clinical systems leadership.