A survey of health professions learners’ attitudes towards social media in medical education: a substance use disorders education case study

BACKGROUND: Social media is a ubiquitous part of the modern world and plays a key role in the dissemination of information. While utilizing social media for educational purposes has been repeatedly demonstrated as feasible, it has been underutilized in medical education and remains a critical opportunity to integrate microlearning and stigma reduction curricula. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey on social media usage, attitudes, and beliefs was sent to medical and nursing students at two large academic institutions within Philadelphia. Descriptive statistics are reported, and non-parametric tests were utilized for exploratory analyses. RESULTS: Health learners were low consumers of social media, reporting using the majority of social media platforms for under an hour a week each. The most used platforms were Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Learners overwhelmingly endorsed that social media can be used to enhance health knowledge (72.4%) and as a valuable learning tool for health profession students (65.5%). The statements with the highest endorsement were that social media can influence how providers view and interact with their patients (85.1%) and that social media can be used as a tool to reduce and address bias (75.9%). While learners were skeptical of the trustworthiness of information on social media, they reported that they were able to determine whether a source was trustworthy (77.0%). Lastly, most health learners reported they would use an evidence-based social media page on a short video-based platform like Instagram or TikTok (57.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Although health learners may represent low social media users, they did report that they consumed and engaged with health information on social media and agreed social media could be used to enhance their health knowledge and influence their interactions with patients. This represents an opportunity in medical education to better utilize social media as a modality for microlearning, stigma reduction, and the dissemination of accurate health information from a trusted source.