The Social Networking Issue

Social networking seemingly appeared with a resounding bang just over 5 years ago and the way in which they have influenced popular culture, truly, is a phenomenon of our time.   

Research conducted in the US on medics showed that while most of the participants would deny or ignore ‘friend requests’ from patients on the internet, a minority would consider accepting the request on an individual basis and a small number had already, in the past, accepted requests from patients; granting them full access to personal information uploaded or input on to the site.  

 Although many people find the freedom of the internet an excellent and efficient way to relieve stresses and tension from day to day living, as well as using social networking sites as tools to express themselves, users will often find themselves less inhibited on the internet; resulting in the exposure of information which may not, in reality, have been exposed.  

The implications of defamation has led to warnings from big –community-pharmacy-chain-head-offices have filtered through the branches of bureaucracy and influenced many pharmacists in the community sector to alter their privacy settings from ‘public’ to ‘private’. For many social network sites the default settings of profiles is ‘public’; meaning patients can see what you upload or tweet automatically, something worth considering if your friends or family have access to your account. 

As pharmacy students; Standards of Conduct and Ethics are driven home and signed up to, often from the first term, and this is mirrored and re-enforced during application to the register; to agree to act in a professional manner and to promote the pharmacy profession.  Now pharmacy technicians are registered professionals, they too must comply with standards of conduct and ethics; 24 hours a day rather than 9-5 Monday to Friday.   

But surely social networking sites can’t be all bad, can they? They could be considered as a tool to enable professionals to contact one another, a forum that increasingly will allow ‘groups’ of pharmacy professionals to discuss topics, arrange meetings, share experiences – something which can only be beneficial to the profession and to patient safety. Furthermore they allow patients to observe that pharmacy professionals are still human; we cannot magically wave our pens and produce legally valid, safe, effective, perfectly bagged and labelled prescriptions faster than you can say Simvastatin; nor stock every drug known to man; or concoct potions to relieve symptoms after the first application.  

To my knowledge, no legal influence holds sway for professionals’ activity on social networking sites. As registered professionals however, Standard of Conduct and Ethics are expected to be upheld, unless supported and defended by fierce justification.  It seems therefore, that each pharmacy professional must make judgements for him or herself to determine if what they are uploading is appropriate and inline with such standards.  

On a final note: setting your profile to ‘private’ usually means that only those you have ‘accepted’ will be able to see what you post.  In a patient facing role, it is much easier to encourage patient compliance through faith; to obtain information through trust; and to advise in a professional capacity when patients are not aware that you have just tweeted about ‘coping with a wine- induced hangover’ or that ‘you were so drunk last night you gave a sock to a midget and yelled “Dobby! You’re free!”’