Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Education
Date Submitted: Feb 29, 2024
Date Accepted: Feb 25, 2025
#Medical_Medical_School_Life: A Cross-Sectional Survey on the Ethical Use of Social Media and Sharing of Patient Information by Medical Students at a University Hospital in Saudi Arabia
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media has become an integral part of many medical students’ lives, blurring the lines between their personal and professional identities as many aspects of their medical careers appear online. Physicians must understand how to responsibly navigate these sites.
Objective:
This study aimed to identify how medical students use social media and their awareness and adherence to ethical guidelines of e-professionalism
Methods:
This is a cross-sectional study delivered as an online voluntary survey to senior medical students at King Abdulaziz University Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. We investigated how many students used social media, their privacy settings, possible breaches of ethical standards, and portrayed their training institute online.
Results:
The survey was distributed to 1,546 participants. A total of 400 responded, yielding a response rate of 26%. Among the participants, 24% had public social media accounts, while 41% had both private and public accounts. As for breaches in e-professionalism, eleven participants (3%) posted a picture of a patient on social media without their permission, while 75 (20%) posted part of an excised organ or x-ray on social media without their permission, and 60 (16%) discussed a patient. With regards to sharing medical school information, 108 (29%) discussed an incident at their medical school, and 119 (31%) participants shared a lecture online without the presenter’s permission. Approximately 66% of the participants reported that they were unaware if their institution had a professional code of conduct for social media use, and 70% did not receive training on the professional use of social media.
Conclusions:
Medical students must be taught to recognize inappropriate online behavior, understand their role as representatives of their medical school, and know the potential repercussions of unprofessional conduct on social media. This could be accomplished by providing workshops, regular seminars on e-professionalism, and including principles of social media conduct in existing ethics courses.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.