Dissemination is a crucial step in evidence-based practice (EBP), which helps to integrate and sustain a practice change. One cannot ignore the fact that technological advances have markedly revolutionized the way health professionals search for, access, and use information. The power of technology can be harnessed to facilitate the dissemination of EBP knowledge on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (Zhu, Xing, Hu, Zhou, & Gu, 2018). The rationale for the selected dissemination method is the increasing Internet penetration of global communities and healthcare providers’ preference for synthesized facts and findings that could inform point-of-care decision-making (Dyson et al., 2017). As the experiment by Dyson et al. (2017) has shown, science-themed social media accounts gain a decent following and click rates.
Another dissemination strategy I would consider is using messengers, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Viber, for sharing the latest EBP findings. The main motivation for this method is the popularity of these platforms: Facebook Messenger alone counts two billion users, and WhatsApp comes close second with 1.3 billion (Tankovska, 2021). Furthermore, messengers have features allowing the creation of channels for group chats, which ensures that a message reaches its target audience.
For all their advantages, there are barriers to using both social media and messengers. Social media have become oversaturated with information noise that leads to consumer fatigue. The disadvantage can be mitigated if social media accounts contain useful, concise posts that add value to customers’ experiences. The same goes for messengers: the messages in specialized chat should stand out among the usual spam that individuals receive daily and capture attention in a good sense.
The two methods that I would refrain from using are posters and committee meetings. Posters are rather challenging to make in the first place, and when installed, they run a risk of becoming another element of the interior. Besides, updating information on posters is nigh-on impossible, in contrast to social media. Committee meetings may prove to be not sufficiently interacting where the majority of people passively consume information without interacting with it.
References
Dyson, M. P., Newton, A. S., Shave, K., Featherstone, R. M., Thomson, D., Wingert, A.,… & Hartling, L. (2017). Social media for the dissemination of cochrane child health evidence: evaluation study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 19(9), e308.
Tankovska, H. (2021). Most popular global mobile messaging apps 2020.Statista. Web.
Zhu, Z., Xing, W., Hu, Y., Zhou, Y., & Gu, Y. (2018). Improving evidence dissemination and accessibility through a mobile-based resource platform. Journal of Medical Systems, 42(7), 1-8.