Contact us and share your opinion

Social Media Guidance for Doctors and clinicians: pre-SCRIBE

Are you aware of the social media guidance that exists to keep doctors, clinicians and patients safe?

In this post, I show you various forms of formal social media guidance, why these are needed and explore my own easy to use version called pre-SCRIBE.

Following recent articles in magazines like STAT that have commented why doctors shouldn’t use social media, other reply articles by the organisation SoMeDocs and SELF have shown why doctors and clinicians should. But the important part is like with any tool to use social media safely. 

Formal guidance exists like that from the General Medical Council (GMC), the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), the British Medical Association (BMA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) to name a few. 

These are detailed and less effective in the moment, so I would suggest using a quicker tool call pre-SCRIBE. pre-SCRIBE (before you write) stands for

• Share
• Confidentiality
• Respect
• Identity
• Boundaries
• Engage

This episode explores all these aspects and I share how they can be useful, including other tips to help keep you safe when using social media as a doctor.

Watch the episode here: https://youtu.be/vh1uOCFGkTk

Links:

STAT on social media restraint by doctors.: https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/10/doctors-social-media-restraint/

SELF article: https://www.self.com/story/social-media-doctors

SoMeDocs: https://doctorsonsocialmedia.com/

Reply article by SoMeDocs: https://doctorsonsocialmedia.com/doctors-should-dive-into-the-social-media-waters-stat/

GMC: https://www.gmc-uk.org/ethical-guidance/ethical-guidance-for-doctors/doctors-use-of-social-media

RCGP:https://www.rcgp.org.uk/social-media

BMA:https://www.bma.org.uk/advice/employment/ethics/social-media-guidance-for-doctors

AMA: https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/professionalism-use-social-media