Louise Robertson Specialist Dietitian Louise is an experienced NHS Dietitian specialising in the fascinating area of Inherited Metabolic Disorders in adults. In her spare time she enjoys running her blog ‘Dietitian’s Life’ with her colleague and good friend Sarah Howe. www. dietitianslife.com
While working through my emails, I came across one from the BDA asking if I would be willing to hold the @NHS Twitter handle for Dietitians Week. How exciting, a chance to highlight the work of dietitians and the field of Inherited Metabolic Disorders (IMD). Each week, NHS England uses the Twitter account to spotlight a health professional or patient from the NHS. There have been paramedics, nurses, doctors, but this was the first time a dietitian would hold the account. The aim is to be on the Twitter account from Monday to Friday, tweeting about dayto-day life in the NHS. At first I was a bit worried, as I only work part time; what would I tweet about on my days off? NHS England reassured me that people like to see the personal side too. My first task was to write a plan for the week. I decided to include general dietetic issues, such as working in a hospital and malnutrition and then towards the end of the week talk more about my speciality of IMD and specifically Phenylketonuria (PKU). I then had a teleconference with NHS England, my hospital communications and the BDA. I went through my plan and had a safety briefing which included the importance of not tweeting out any clinical information and what to do if challenged. I was also given a list of ‘trolls’ to look out too. I had a few weeks to prepare, so I started to take useful photos around the hospital. I persuaded some of my colleagues to pose with supplements and diet sheets and found feeding tubes and bags of feeds to photograph. I was
all ready to go for Dietitians Week when we had to change the date due to the general election. A couple of weeks later, we were ready to go. NHS England set me up with some intro tweets and then I was in charge at 8.30am. IT had given me permission to use Twitter on my desktop and I started tweeting about the role of a dietitian. At lunch time I headed over to the dietetic department to persuade the dietitians to pose while eating their lunch and then one willing volunteer took me up to the wards to take photos. Taking pictures without any patient or clinical information in them was tricky. I had to use virtual stickers on the photos to cover information up. It was an enjoyable week, but scheduling and tweeting live stories and answering all the questions took time. I had to wade through all the @NHS mentions and answer everyone meant for me. It was fun taking photos and videos of what my fellow dietitians and I were up to and I am happy to say that I didn’t have any trolling! And I did get encouraging messages, including from people telling me how helpful their dietitians had been. Keep up the great work guys. Photos from my Twitter week are on our blog at: www.dietitianslife.com/ dietitians-life/a-dietitians-week/ www.NHDmag.com October 2017 - Issue 128
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