Proposal for the surgery to have a social media presence

[MarkR]

At the PPG meeting on Tuesday 21 Jan 2020 Dr Craig Milne mentioned that the Practise were looking into having a social media presence but felt that a major barrier was the potential problem of monitoring for inappropriate comments.

He asked for any ideas.  My suggestion is: Use Instagram

Instagram allows you to turn off comments. Although it is image based I believe it could be made to work as explained below. It also has the advantage of appealing to a younger demographic (who I imagine are harder for the surgery to reach).

Posts could be about any news or information item – the sort of items that are made alerts on the PPS website.   Given that the posts have to be images one could do this as follows:

• A photograph of a new poster that has recently been put up in the surgery
• A photograph of a word-processed document describing a new process/facility available in the surgery.  Ideally this should include (copyright free) images/cartoons to make it visually more appealing
• A photo of a colourful handwritten note saying something like “Make sure you order any prescriptions now”, “Time for flu inoculations – are you eligible? – check on the Surgery website”.

This could be setup and managed as follows:

1. Set up an Instagram account with a name such as prestonparksurgery (this is available).
2. The profile page of the account could have essential details such as surgery address and a link to the Surgery website. (You can’t have links on individual posts)
3. Designate someone (could be more than one) in the surgery who has a mobile phone as the official Instagram person(s).
4. The Instagram person would regularly (once a week?) photograph a poster/hand written note, etc. and post it but turn off comments. (You do have to do this per post – there is no global switch so you would need someone who is good at detail – although you can turn them of retrospectively).
5. If the person is junior then they would need to either get sign off from Janak or Janak would need to prompt them about the subject for each post.
6. In the surgery have a poster and leaflets inviting patients to follow the Surgery on Instagram giving them the name prestonparksurgery to search for and follow.

Any comments anyone?  Do you think this could work?

[Author]

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