E. Professionalism:Medical Students Pattern of Social Media Use, Attitudes and Perceptions in the Age of Online Social Networking

Abstract

Objective: To understand medical students' perspectives on e-professionalism, including their online
presence in social networking sites (SNS), professional boundaries, and the appropriateness of content
shared on SNS.
Material and Methods: Following Institutional Review Board approval & informed consent, data was
collected from 1100 medical students in a public sector medical university in Lahore. An anonymous, self-
administered questionnaire based on previous literature was used for data collection. Questionnaire covered
demographic information; Social networking usage pattern; online privacy & profile; professional boundaries;
and appropriateness of posted content related to social networking sites. Data was analyzed by SPSS 26.0.
Results: Almost all the medical students (1087, 99%) were using social media, mainly "WhatsApp" and
"Facebook". Forty-six% (510) of them never monitored their online presence at any social media site. More
than 3/4 of the students had their personal information available on SNS. Nearly half (48.2%) students accepted
friend requests from faculty and 470 (42.8%) medical students invited faculty as friend. Students overall exhibited
good understanding of posts related to violation of patients' privacy, description of patient encounter in
negative tone, derogatory remarks about ones' institution, faculty, classmates and medical profession etc, as
being unprofessional and inappropriate. Only a small percentage (14%) of students mentioned any discussion
regarding online medical professionalism in classes and just 19.5% were aware of any guidelines related to
social media use in medical profession.
Conclusion: Social media use is prevalent among medical students. Better understanding of student's
pattern of social media uses as well as their perspectives of unprofessional content and how they feel medical
schools should improve awareness of these issues could help inform policy development efforts as well as
approaches to teach medical e-professionalism.
Keywords: Social media; Social networking; Medical education; Medical students; Professionalism