Cues Disseminated by Professional Associations That Represent 5 Health Care Professions Across 5 Nations: Lexical Analysis of Tweets.

BACKGROUND: Collaboration across health care professions is critical in efficiently and effectively managing complex and chronic health conditions, yet interprofessional care does not happen automatically. Professional associations have a key role in setting a profession's agenda, maintaining professional identity, and establishing priorities. The associations' external communication is commonly undertaken through social media platforms, such as Twitter. Despite the valuable insights potentially available into professional associations through such communication, to date, their messaging has not been examined. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to identify the cues disseminated by professional associations that represent 5 health care professions spanning 5 nations. METHODS: Using a back-iterative application programming interface methodology, public tweets were sourced from professional associations that represent 5 health care professions that have key roles in community-based health care: general practice, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, and social work. Furthermore, the professional associations spanned Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. A lexical analysis was conducted of the tweets using Leximancer (Leximancer Pty Ltd) to clarify relationships within the discourse. RESULTS: After completing a lexical analysis of 50,638 tweets, 7 key findings were identified. First, the discourse was largely devoid of references to interprofessional care. Second, there was no explicit discourse pertaining to physiotherapists. Third, although all the professions represented in this study support patients, discourse pertaining to general practitioners was most likely to be connected with that pertaining to patients. Fourth, tweets pertaining to pharmacists were most likely to be connected with discourse pertaining to latest and research. Fifth, tweets about social workers were unlikely to be connected with discourse pertaining to health or care. Sixth, notwithstanding a few exceptions, the findings across the different nations were generally similar, suggesting their generality. Seventh and last, tweets pertaining to physiotherapists were most likely to refer to discourse pertaining to profession. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that health care professional associations do not use Twitter to disseminate cues that reinforce the importance of interprofessional care. Instead, they largely use this platform to emphasize what they individually deem to be important and advance the interests of their respective professions. Therefore, there is considerable opportunity for professional associations to assert how the profession they represent complements other health care professions and how the professionals they represent can enact interprofessional care for the benefit of patients and carers.

Making sense of COVID-19 over time in New Zealand: Assessing the public conversation using Twitter.

COVID-19 has ruptured routines and caused breakdowns in what had been conventional practice and custom: everything from going to work and school and shopping in the supermarket to socializing with friends and taking holidays. Nonetheless, COVID-19 does provide an opportunity to study how people make sense of radically changing circumstances over time. In this paper we demonstrate how Twitter affords this opportunity by providing data in real time, and over time. In the present research, we collect a large pool of COVID-19 related tweets posted by New Zealanders-citizens of a country successful in containing the coronavirus-from the moment COVID-19 became evident to the world in the last days of 2019 until 19 August 2020. We undertake topic modeling on the tweets to foster understanding and sensemaking of the COVID-19 tweet landscape in New Zealand and its temporal development and evolution over time. This information can be valuable for those interested in how people react to emergent events, including researchers, governments, and policy makers.