Join Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Dr Catherine Calderwood, on 7 September 2016, 12.30-1.30 (UK time) in a #PublicHealthHour webinar. Continue reading to find out more.

The idea for #ScotPublicHealth and #PublicHealthHour emerged late 2015. We would use freely available technology to bring colleagues interested in Public Health together on a regular basis, rotating through the 9 key areas of Public Health. The idea was to use #ScotPublicHealth to label messages of interest to the Scottish Public Health community and #PublicHealthHour for scheduled gatherings on social media with the wider Public Health community across the UK and, hopefully, further afield.

We held our first Twitter-based #PublicHealthHour in January 2016. Many of the early participants were a little unsure of social media, so we ran the second session as a “webinar with tweeting”, with Prof Chris Oliver, University of Edinburgh, telling us about both tweeting and physical activity.

This “webinar with tweeting” format worked well, and we have run further sessions with Glasgow Centre for Population Health, where we learnt about infographics and assets-based approaches to health; and NHS Health Scotland and UCL Institute of Health Equity where we discussed health inequalities and NHS Health Scotland’s experience of using social media in broadcasting a message and engaging with public and professionals.

We have grown as a network, largely using social media. Our first Twitter session had 31 active participants; our September 2016 session – details below – has over 180 people signed up, with a week to go. These numbers are well beyond the capacity of our local webinar set up, but fellow NHS colleagues met through social media have kindly stepped in to host the session – real world connections through the virtual world. Since November 2016 we have had over 10 million views of our tweets and 1,248 people and organisations tweeting and retweeting about #ScotPublicHealth. The 5 #PublicHealthHour sessions (including the forthcoming webinar on 7 September) have generated 4.2 million views and tweets/ retweets from 646 participants. Other opportunities have opened up – eg tweeting about our work on global Twitter feed WePublicHealth. As with the real world, the message is clear – engage, engage, engage. Sign up to receive updates on the ScotPublicHealth blog.

Our next session is set to be our most ambitious yet. Join Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Dr Catherine Calderwood, on 7 September 2016, 12.30-1.30 (UK time) in a #PublicHealthHour webinar. We will be discussing the CMO report Realistic Medicine, and will be joined by Sir Muir Gray, Director of Better Value Healthcare, and Carol Read, Transformation Fellow, Horizons, NHS England in a panel discussion. We will gather ideas about Public Health’s role in Realistic Medicine through “crowdsourcing”, using Crowdicity (click link to join in), adding another social media technique to our armoury.

If you have questions that you would like to ask the CMO during the session please post them on this Slido page (open until 7.45AM on 7 September).

Join the webinar on 7 September, 12.30-1.30 by clicking here.

I am very grateful to colleagues in NHS England (Paul Woodley and Helen Bevan) for hosting this event on their Webex setup.

Dr Graham Mackenzie (gmacscotland)

31 August 2016