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Healthcare leaders should encourage more clinicians to produce social media content to help communicate public health advice and tackle false information, according to a social media medical influencer.
Paediatrician Dr Lillie Parker, who boasts over 100,000 Instagram followers under the doctor.lils handle, argued that “humans are craving human interaction” at a time when GP numbers and health visitors are dropping.
Nevertheless, she highlighted an underlying “anxiety” surrounding the idea of healthcare professionals leveraging their communication abilities to connect with people online.
Dr Parker addressed the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) Conference in Manchester on tackling communication challenges in an era of misinformation, sharing the stage with specialists from the UKHSA and World Health Organisation (WHO).
She said: “I think public health needs to realise, that for better or worse, humans are craving human interaction.
“A carousel post of text coming from an organisation is not what the public are going to engage in. In that 1.8 seconds they are going to scroll past, they will not be reading what you have to say.
“And I think organisations like UKHSA and the WHO are actually recognising this, probably before NHS England is, but I think all of those organisations need to see that human beings are the way to get to people, albeit human beings on a screen.
“Human beings have been cut back in communities. We’ve got less health visitors, we’ve got less GPs, but actually everyone has a smartphone, and those people can reach people on their smartphone.
“Lots of doctors are focused in communication. We are trained in how to talk to the public, how to get messages across, but there is an anxiety around those people being on social media.”
Dr Parker said she would “love” content creation to be part of her job, and told delegates she has cut back on her NHS hours.
“I only work 60 per cent off the NHS, and I don’t get paid for the rest of the time,” she added.
“But I’m doing it for free because I’m passionate about what I do. So why can’t it be part of my job? I would love that.”
Dr Parker said she in an “NHS clinician first and always will be”, but created her page about three years ago after noticing friends and family who were having children were becoming overwhelmed “with the amount of noise online and a lot of misinformation that was coming their way”.
She said: “I think we all know that parents have access to more information than ever before, but actually, far from empowering parents, I’ve found that it’s been very overwhelming for people, and it’s making a generation that are more anxious and feel more pressure than ever to get things right when it comes to health, when it comes to raising children and children’s health in particular.”
When asked what organisations should be doing to tackle misinformation on social media, Dr Parker said: “Use the content creators that are already there.”
NHS England launched an account on TikTok during the summer.
It followed a warning from national medical director Professor Frankie Swords that people are seeking out health information from “unreliable” sources.
