There's no getting away from the fact that health and healthcare in the UK is political. The recent Junior Doctors’ strike, NHS bursaries, DH nursing, midwifery and allied health professions policy unit and the EU referendum demonstrate this. Increasingly social media can influence much of the debate, independent of mainstream press.
We live in a democracy and politics can be positive force for change. Many of us need to engage with the politics of health to improve services, raise the profile of what we do and get things done. Allied Health Professions (AHPs), as individual professions and allied together, are often political and as smaller professions we sometimes need to shout to make our voices heard.
All of this means WeAHPs are frequently asked to lead or support reactions to political priorities and decisions. This brings some challenges for the WeAHPs team. So we thought now was a good time to set out our position.
Brokers of discussion
The WeCommunities are an alliance of over 15 tweetchat communities run by healthcare professionals, as volunteers, who believe passionately that through connecting people and sharing information, ideas and expertise we can improve health and healthcare. With a combined followership of over 100,000 we take our reach and potential influence seriously.
WeAHPs see our role as brokers of discussion, helping you to connect with other people and listen to different sides of debate. We aim to help our tweetchats be contemporary, professional and safe spaces for conversation on a broad range of topics. As a grassroots community we lack the power of hierarchy or money, therefore we need to work with a range of stakeholders, remain neutral and not alienate ourselves from different organisations or communities.
We run @WeAHPs as volunteers so we all have day jobs. This means we also need to be mindful of expectations and relationships in our working lives.
So here’s what you can expect from us:
What you won’t see:
Politics is not a dirty word
Politics is not a dirty word. Social justice, equality and inclusion are all intricately part of healthcare. It’s also important to be aware of the strategic decisions that affect health services. We’d encourage you to get involved in the politics of health and you can look to us for information and a forum for balanced debate, just don’t ask us to take sides.
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@WeNurses
16 June 2016 15:04
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Thank you for articulating this so well and WeNurses can only echo this. WeNurses primary aim is to connect Nurses in order to share information, ideas, knowledge & support with the hope that this creates some ripples that help to improve patient care. Although we often discuss policy and contentious issues we aspire to do so in a productive and constructive way and always try to ensure that party politics and personal political opinions are not expressed. We endeavour to ensure that we present both sides of an argument and are of the firm belief that it is often not what you say but how you say it that matters - so we will often retweet opinions an ask people what they think, generating conversation and sharing thoughts rather than sharing our own opinions. We hope that this comes across. Being a conversation generator and connector of people in such a wide open space brings it's challenges but we hope that by sticking to our core purpose - the sharing of knowledge, information, ideas, experiences, expertise and support - we can continue to contribute in a worthwhile way. Thanks again for writing such a wonderful blog |
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@emmatom37
14 June 2016 21:13
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Great blog! As a volunteer on @WeSchoolNurse account it is difficult sometimes to know how to respond to political comments.You have hit the nail on the head here. Well said. |
