“A great tool to open your eyes”: new graduate physiotherapists’ perceptions and use of social media for learning

Figures & data

Table 1. Example semi-structured interview questions and probing questions.

Example Interview Questions
Definition of social media provided. What are your thoughts on using social media as a learning tool? How have you engaged with social media to learn in your first/first two years of practice? How has social media influenced your learning experience? What are some challenges you have faced when using social media for learning? What are some concerns you have about social media as a learning tool? How do you determine the credibility and reliability of a particular social media resource? Describe how equipped you feel navigating social media as a new graduate physiotherapist. How relevant or applicable are social media content in your clinical practice?
Example Probing Questions
What are some advantages and limitations to using social media as a learning tool? Describe your experience with different social media platforms you have used. Aside from clinical knowledge, have you used social media for learning of other domains of professional practice? How has social media created new opportunities for learning? Why do you think new graduates may choose social media over traditional learning resources when seeking new information? Can you describe how social media has influenced the way your practice or management of patients? How do you think universities can better prepare new graduate physiotherapists to navigate social media?

Figure 1. Theme 1 as an example to illustrate the general inductive approach to qualitative data analysis (Thomas, 2006) (SM = social media).

Table 2. De-identified participant demographic information.

Participant #	Gender	Age (yrs)	Entry-level Program Completed	Months since graduation	Employment Status	Setting(s) of Practice*	Scope(s) of Practice*
P1	M	21	Bachelor	6	Full time	Private practice	Musculoskeletal
P2	M	24	Bachelor	6	Full time	Private practice and residential aged care	Musculoskeletal, neurological, aged care
P3	F	22	Bachelor	6	Full time	Hospital and rehabilitation	Neurological, cardiorespiratory
P4	F	24	Bachelor	6	Full time	Private practice	Neurology, pediatrics, musculoskeletal, sports
P5	M	22	Bachelor	6	Part time	Private practice	Musculoskeletal
P6	F	22	Bachelor	6	Full time	Hospital and outpatient services	Cardiorespiratory
P7	M	27	Masters	6	Full time	Private practice and rehabilitation	Musculoskeletal, neurological, aged care
P8	F	23	Bachelor	6	Full time	Hospital and outpatient services	Musculoskeletal, cardiorespiratory
P9	M	25	Masters	18	Full time	Private practice	Paediatrics, cardiorespiratory, neurological
P10	F	25	Masters	18	Full time	Hospital and outpatient services	Neurological, cardiorespiratory
P11	M	22	Bachelor	6	Full time	Private practice and private hospital	Musculoskeletal
P12	F	23	Bachelor	7	Full time	Hospital and outpatient services	Neurological
P13	F	25	Masters	18	Full time	Private practice and residential aged care	Musculoskeletal, neurological, aged care
P14	M	28	Masters	18	Full time	Private practice	Musculoskeletal, sports
P15	F	26	Bachelor	6	Part time	Private practice	Musculoskeletal
P16	M	22	Bachelor	6	Full time	Hospital and outpatient services	Neurological

*Health Workforce Australia (2014) Data categories.

Figure 2. Pictorial representation of themes (SM = social media).

Table

Theme 1 – Social Media as Tools for Learning

“(Social media) is a good educational source … because you’re not taking a PD course every weekend, but it’s still nice to see the new up-to-date research and any cool new exercises of how things might be done. It’s still a useful educational tool.” (Participant 5)

“(Social media) makes (learning) so much easier, it basically just puts it right in front of you … if I didn’t have that, I would say I very rarely go looking for papers that have come out in the last year myself, unless I’m directed to them.” (Participant 12)

“Social media is really easy and accessible … just being able to flip open your phone and see posts makes learning faster” (Participant 1)

“I do like digesting information every day, doesn’t have to be much, and that’s the convenient thing about Instagram, because it’s maybe one or two pages and its very clean cut and just gets right to the point … you don’t always have time to open up a journal to kind of read the latest articles so when (social media) can consolidate everything, it does make it easier.” (Participant 5)

“(Social media) to me is more of like a life or relaxation thing as opposed to an active work thing … I don’t really go out and engage with those resources because I don’t want my work to come home with me … ” (Participant 13)

“[Instagram] is easy, like, it just appears on your feed, and you’re like, oh, that’s cool, learn something today.” (Participant 14)

“It’s handy to just tap into social media, it’s quick, it’s the accessibility, I guess, that just makes it chosen.” (Participant 8)

“There’s some really nice sort of Instagram pages that I use that find a really nice way of summarizing and synthesizing some new evidence that comes out.” (Participant 9)

“I wouldn’t say (social media) replaces traditional learning. It’s more just a tool that you can adopt. I mean, social media, I think, has many great things, but also, there’s also the trade-off of that.” (Participant 5)

“I switch on SM … not necessarily as an education tool, but more for relaxation and a chance to catch up with my friends and switch off from work … I just dissociate it a bit from work … leave work at work and have your social media and things at home … ” (Participant 4)

I’m more of a visual learner over just like reading, so (social media) is the second-best thing, rather than just getting someone else to come and show me or whatever it may be … or I sometimes find an article and then look for further explanation via a video or something like that.” (Participant 4)

Theme 2 – Navigating and Engaging with Social Media as a Learner

“If we see something new, we will try it on each other and see what we think … because a lot of my friends work in a lot of different places, I feel like we can put all of our heads together and kind of bounce back ideas.” (P15)

“ … you’re following a few pages, and then one day, you might see an exercise that you think might be beneficial for a patient that you might be seeing … I tend to save it into a library so I can look back later and implement it for the patients.” (Participant 1)

“I feel like it always helps to talk (SM content) out with other new grads … like we’ve had different caseloads and have seen different things … it does help put our limited experience together to see how different patients react to different treatments.” (Participant 3)

“Normally, I’ll do like the save to collection feature. And then, you know, I’ll bring it up in a team meeting and ask someone, you know, if I really feel like I’m really interested, I, I’ll do a bit of research on it myself.” (Participant 2)

Theme 3 – Thinking Critically about Social Media

“A lot of social media … in my experience, try and sell treatments for certain things or conditions like a one stop shop.” (Participant 16)

“When something’s too broad or generalized like overarching statement about back pain, it’s easy to take at face value, but there’s lots of different influencing factors … you can kind of miss some of the finer details and misinterpret it … that would be the sort of content that I’d be more wary of … pages that have one quote on them without any other background information…” (Participant 4)

“The difference between a good page and a bad page on social media is if they put their references up with their claims … people who promise quick fixes to complex patient cases never have references … they’re just spewing their opinion and not fact.” (Participant 7)

“I feel like people have really strong opinions about certain things, so you’ve got to be kind of … careful … in the end, it’s all just opinions out there, it’s not like they are throwing out articles … .” (Participant 3)

“Lots of different people post information and you don’t really know if it’s credible or not when you first look at it, and I guess that’s when you got to use your own judgment and going into looking at the research yourself … ” (Participant 9)

“There’s a lot of information out there … it’s about being mindful of where you’re getting your information from, because anyone can post on social media … you just need to critically reason where everything is coming from … if we take everything just as it is, you can run into some problems … ” (Participant 15)

“A lot of social media can be generalized in its approach, not patient specific.” (Patient 16)

“You can get a lot of conflicting and not reliable sources on social media, you have to take it with a grain of salt.” (Participant 6)

“When treating patients in the health industry … something with quite a fair bit of importance … and you’re basing the principles you’re applying off social media, I’ll definitely go and make sure it’s credible and got some weighting behind it.” (P16)

“Unless you go to the source where that evidence came from and see what the research was, you’re using double-handled information, which they potentially could have gotten that from somebody else themselves … ” (Participant 16)

Theme 4 – Relevance to Practice

“I follow Physio network on Instagram, and I had someone who came in with plantar foot pain and I was able to differentiate the kind of the cause of the injury and develop some exercise because I had come across that on their post.” (Participant 10)

“I guess a lot of the stuff that’s prevalent, on social media is more about pain management and chronic pain issues, which I don’t really apply very much, because it’s just not appropriate in an acute hospital setting.” (Participant 14)

“For instance, last week, I was listening to a podcast on diagnosis of fat pad impingements, and there was a couple of new like treatment ideas that had just come out in terms of research, and I actually had a patient presenting last week, which through my assessments indicated, it was more fat pad impingement and so I integrated those ideas that I’ve listened to in the podcast into treatment … just like an extra tool, a couple of things I hadn’t thought about before, but they were actually really useful treatment techniques and seemed to have really good benefit for the patient.” (Participant 8)

“ … the musculoskeletal side of physio seems to be the most vocal and the most prevalent on social media … which I guess is good for us who are working in the hospital because we don’t necessarily get to do a lot of musculoskeletal practice.” (Participant 14)

“Just last week, I was watching this video of someone doing some core stability work for a patient for lower back pain patients, and I ended up prescribing one of the exercises that I saw from the video to my patients who came in with low back pain.” (Participant 2)

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