Hello I am Elaine McInnes, one of the new #WeHVs twitter team. Health visiting has gone through an unprecedented growth over the past 4 years through ‘Call to Action’. The service is ‘transformed’ and ready to lead the under 5s years to a better future through improved preventative and universal public health. The army of highly skilled and motivated health visitors are facing a bright future and Twitter is one method for connecting health visitors and the public in such a way we can raise the profile of not only the service but the needs of the communities we serve.
We are launching the @WeHealthVisitor group on 7th July as a way of introducing the health visiting service to social media, and giving health visitors and parents a louder voice to say what we do, what we want and how we do it together. The chats will be every 4th Tuesday from 8 – 9 pm via #WeHVs, the first being ‘What is a health visitor’ led by our @WeHealthVisitor group lead, Andrea Johns.
You can see from our bios that the @WeHealthVisitor twitter leadership team are all qualified health visitors, some are newly qualified and can well remember how hard the SCPHN training is and the feeling of both terror and euphoria! during key milestones such as our first home visit alone and our first day in practice as a qualified HV. Others have been around a while and supported the recent transformation from front line practice, from educational establishments and by participating in research projects supporting the Healthy Child Programme. We want to hear from you all as part of our community, let us know when you are undergoing a key milestone or have discovered an article that others may want to hear about.
One thing all our volunteers have in common is that nervous feeling when we sent our first tweet. Tweeting can be a lonely place on your own…only a year ago I was a virtual novice, learning as I went along. I began running chats in 2014. I started off by asking constant questions such as: What is a RT? What is a hashtag? What is a twitter handle? What is Tweetdeck? Quickly I learned the ‘lingo’ and discovered the world can be connected through social media. Of course running a chat is only part of the picture! Learning how to create a word cloud and negotiate the chat analytics to pull together the chat summaries was a challenging opportunity. To see the chat come to life through a story for all to benefit from was a light bulb moment! and I was hooked!
Through @WeHealthVisitor & #WeHVs we aim to connect with and share great practice with colleagues not only from health visitor teams but with other services involved in achieving the best outcomes for the 0-19 years services.
|
@{{Comment.screenName}}
{{Comment.DateCreated | date:"dd MMMM yyyy HH:mm"}}
|
{{Comment.Comment}} |
