Team Haem – Case Study
We spoke with Chris Tiplady, an @TeamHaem founder, about what inspired its creation and about his personal social media journey.
What?
TeamHaem is a group set up by hematologists Emily Graves, Andrew McGregor and Jennifer Young to share and discuss hematology cases via Twitter and a blog.
When?
Launched November 2012.
When I first started using Twitter, I was just reading other people’s tweets. I joined in with @Twitjc (a journal club), followed @amcunningham, and discovered hashtags to find subjects. I saw #FOAMEd, which tags Free Open Access Medical Education resources, and that helped me find more. One day, I received a tweet from @gasclass, a group set up by a colleague in the region to discuss anesthetic cases. They asked for my hematological opinion on their case. It became a great discussion and was very educational, so I started looking around to see if anything similar had been set up for hematologists, but I couldn’t find anything.
How?
I approached one of our registrars, Emily Graves, and she and her colleagues Andrew McGregor and Jennifer Young have built @TeamHaem up from there over the last two years. To grow our user base, we link our Twitter group to our blog, which generates traffic for both – which helps us share our passion for hematology and illustrate how we work across specialties in a supportive, approachable way.
We did encounter a problem once; a representative of a patient support group thought that @TeamHaem was an official NHS body and was critical of a delay in the publication of some guidelines to the account. We discussed how to respond to this criticism and decided it was best not to engage in discussion, but we were all worried about how it might appear. You can sometimes feel a duty to respond to every Tweet – you don’t have to.
What's next?
We hope we will influence patient care by improving knowledge and awareness. We also hope it will promote our work in this region of the UK; @TeamHaem reflects much of the ethos of the North East and Cumbria – friendly, supportive and keen to train.
Join In!
Twitter 1,200 followers
Blog 25,000 views
Engagement Greatest from the UK, USA, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Malaysia
Some tips to remember
- Discussion is public; tweets never vanish.
- Follow the General Medical Council’s social media guidance (http://bit.ly/1CcUSbJ).
- Raise your profile. Social media will raise the public profile of those of us in pathology; it will help our profession, recruitment and public understanding of our role.
- Engage. Social media has a great future in pathology!
Chris Tiplady is a consultant hematologist and clinical tutor at Northumbria Healthcare Foundation Trust, UK @christiplady | christiplady.wordpress.com
Chris Tiplady is Consultant Hematologist at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Director of Undergraduate Clinical Studies, Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer, and Programme Lead for Master in Medical Education at the University of Sunderland, Newcastle, UK.
