(P-ED-1) "#Blooducation101: Leveraging Social Media for Global Transfusion Medicine Mentorship"

Social media has become a powerful worldwide tool within medical education, notably in pathology, and can be harnessed to create more visibility in our field to recruit and attract the next generation of trainees. It can serve as a platform to enrich learners in focused educational topics, particularly within blood banking and transfusion medicine (BB/TM) where basic content gaps still exist within pathology residency training. As a way to advance transfusion medicine knowledge while bolstering self-learning and mentorship, we developed a social media curriculum called #Blooducation101. Herein, we describe our pilot experience of this AABB peer mentorship program (AABB PEP) initiative over a nine-month period.

Study

Design/Methods:

The curriculum was created by a working group of three contributors: two pathology residents and a transfusion medicine attending, formed by AABB PEP. A schedule of posts was developed, aligning with the chapter topics of the third edition of "Transfusion Medicine and Hemostasis Clinical and Laboratory Aspects” with permission obtained from the Editor. Each chapter was disseminated on Twitter/X through 2-10 threaded posts, termed "tweetorials," featuring multimedia, weblinks, polls, and discussions. The novel hashtag, #Blooducation101, was inserted in the first post of each tweetorial. Each post was peer-reviewed ensuring quality before self-publication. Following the completion of 17-chapter posts, data was analyzed.  Using Tweetsmap, the #Blooducation101 hashtag and weblinks were used to capture and track post reach.  Engagement data, including impressions and interactions, were captured using Twitter analytics. Statistical analyses were conducted using Prism GraphPad.

Results/Findings:

17 topics were covered and higher number of posts per tweetorial significantly correlated with total engagements, total impressions, detail expands and profile visits (See Figure A i and ii). Cumulatively, these posts garnered over 60,000 impressions and elicited 298 engagements from individuals across 71 countries and 41 cities (Figure A iii). Residents who participated in the AABB PEP program gave the following feedback: “I learned the art of simplifying complex topics to ensure lay audience could comprehend the information contained in the posts” and “I engaged better with the study materials while creating the tweetorials.”

Conclusions:

The significant global reach and initial engagement achieved by the #Blooducation101 pilot series, illustrates the effectiveness of this approach in addressing educational gaps and fostering a sense of community among learners worldwide. Further enhancements can be made to the curriculum by creating more engagements through focused tagging of current trainees or other experts to expand learning and mentorship opportunities.