Social media in paramedic practice

Once again, debate has been sparked on the topic of social media (SoMe) in the paramedic profession. This is the result of some corporate ambulance service ‘tweeters’ recently having posted identifiable photographs of patients in ambulances. The College of Paramedics (CoP) (2019) has also released a timely document covering the use of SoMe for the profession to add to the current guidance provided by Baron and Townsend (2017).

Over the last few months, individuals and some anonymous Twitter accounts have raised concerns about corporate tweeters and ambulance service accounts tweeting patient-identifiable information. These tweets range from photographs of patients' pets to photographs of patients' faces with details of their medical history. Another growing trend in paramedic SoMe use appears to be live-tweeting from incidents, often with photographs of damaged vehicles, clinicians posing for photographs with ambulance equipment during ongoing incidents and, in some cases, photographs of live scenes from road traffic collisions showing patients still lying in the road, dead or injured.