Dear Colleagues, I'm writing to let you know that a new guide for using social media to engage consumers in hospital service design and improvement activities is now available and may interest some of you working in health and health research. Using social media as a tool to facilitate consumer engagement in service design and quality improvement: A guide for hospitals, service providers and consumers was developed as part of my NHMRC-funded PhD project and co-created with Australian hospital service providers and consumers. You can access the guide, the accompanying Implementation Workbook, and read more about the project that led to the guide, on the project website<https://www.latrobe.edu.au/chcp/projects/using-social-media-to-facilitate-consumer-engagement-in-health-service-improvement>. The aim of the guide is to: * Help hospitals, service providers, and consumers understand how social media can be used as a consumer engagement tool * Provide evidence-based strategies and actions for implementing social media as a consumer engagement tool in Australian public hospital service design and QI * Provide implementation tools for social media-based consumer engagement The guide was developed for three main groups of people involved in service design and QI in hospitals: * Hospital decision makers: Service providers and consumer representatives in hospital executive and/or governance roles; Communications professionals who are responsible for managing organisational social media pages and developing communication plans * People who are involved in service design and QI projects: Service providers and consumer representatives who are involved in planning, implementing, and evaluating service design and QI projects * Consumers: Patients, family members, and carers; People in consumer representative roles While it has an Australian public hospital focus, much of the information is broadly applicable to consumer engagement in health and health research. If you have any questions about the guide or my research, please just be in touch. Please also feel free to share the links to the guide and the project website among your networks if you think it would be appropriate. Kind regards, Louisa Louisa Walsh (she/her) Managing Editor, Cochrane Consumers and Communication PhD Candidate Sessional Lecturer/Tutor BPhysio(hons), MStratComm Twitter: @laqwalsh Days of Work - Tuesday and Friday Recent publications: * Social media as a tool for consumer engagement in hospital quality improvement and service design: barriers and enablers for implementation<https://www.ijhpm.com/article_4160.html> * The risks and benefits of using social media to engage consumers in service design and quality improvement<https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-06927-x> * The use of social media as a tool for stakeholder engagement in health service design and quality improvement: A scoping review.<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2055207621996870> * Indirect impacts of COVID-19: A case study of evidence, advice and representation from consumer and community members in New South Wales, Australia<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2374373521998628> Centre for Health Communication and Participation<http://www.latrobe.edu.au/chcp/>, Cochrane Consumers and Communication Group<http://cccrg.cochrane.org/> I School of Psychology and Public Health I College of Science, Health and Engineering I La Trobe University I Victoria I AUSTRALIA. 3086. Ph. +61 3 9479 1578 I Fax. +61 3 9479 5784 I Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/latrobe.CHCP/ Twitter: @CochraneCCRG Newsletter sign-up: http://eepurl.com/RhB6T [cid:image001.png@01D5F87B.B03C8600][cid:image002.png@01D5F87B.B03C8600] Warning to recipients: This email and any attachments are confidential and subject to copyright. If you are not the intended recipient any use, disclosure or copying is unauthorised. If you have received this email in error please advise us immediately by reply email and delete all copies. It is your responsibility to examine this email and any attachments for viruses. Any personal information in this email must be handled in accordance with Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 (Vic).