Tweeting for CPD

Being as I am, une femme d'un certain âge, certain things get harder to master. For example, crying - or not crying to be accurate; when I was nursing, it ‘didn’t do’ to get over-involved and over emotional, so it took a lot to make me cry. Now though, anything can set me off, not just cute puppies/kitten/aardvarks; happy stuff, death, destruction, Mushy from Educating Yorkshire, Tumble (haven’t watched it, it’s just such a rubbish concept it makes me weep that this counts as entertainment!).

I didn’t fare too well at horse riding either. I learnt some basics – front/back, getting on/off (mainly the latter, and not always in the conventional way), stop/start (the latter almost impossible when Tonto was in a mood), and how to muck out, although I may have learnt that in nursing.

And then we get to technology. When we commissioned Don’t Panic to build this site for us, Rob and Stuart, the brains of the outfit, used me as the lowest common denominator – if I could work it, well anyone could. I sat through meetings where technical language and acronyms were bandied about, nodding sagely and agreeing to part with my retirement fund. I would then have to ask Oliver, my business partner to translate – much like nurses do after a consultant’s round.

But I am, albeit slowly, getting to grips with it, and am finding that Twitter is both a source of information and potentially the biggest distraction since I tried to give a lecture with Hull KR rugby club practising outside the room… And it appears I am not the only one. Nurses have taken to twitter in droves, and groups such as We Nurses (#wenurses) are facilitating chats on pre-determined topics.

This is great news, particularly as social media can contribute to our PREP requirements (read all bout it here; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ja). Naturally, the NMC have given us some po-faced rules to work from when using social networking (http://www.nmc-uk.org/nurses-and-midwives/advice-by-topic/a/advice/social-networking-sites/), but I suspect most of you are intelligent enough to work out for yourselves what you should and shouldn’t be saying, and able to sort out what is good for your professional development and what isn’t.

So, why not follow us on Twitter and Facebook as adjuncts to reading PCNR? We use these to highlight issues and bits of information that are pertinent to you (most of the time!) and your profession in between issues. And if the combination of the three can help with you CPD, what have you got to lose?

Deborah