A scoping review of information about pediatric pain shared over social media

Social media is a way that scientists, general public and health care professionals can communicate and share information. Social media includes platforms such as Twitter and YouTube. Although social media is easy to access and is increasing in use, little is known about how child pain is communicated on social media. The purpose of this research is to use systematic literature review methods to explore how social media is used to communicate about pediatric pain, to identify the type of information discussed and shared across social media platforms, and to explore if information being shared is supported by existing evidence-based research. Twitter and YouTube will be searched using key words about pediatric pain. The common information subjects from the Twitter and YouTube posts will be explored. How often each subject is discussed will be reported and compared across YouTube and Twitter. The content of the social media posts will be compared with existing evidence-based research. From a pilot, preliminary search of 50 Twitter posts and YouTube videos, 18 posts (36%) and 25 videos (50%) were relevant for this work. The most common Twitter posts were about managing pediatric pain (50%) or related discussions by professionals (22%) with top keywords used being: pain, pediatric, management, and medication. The most common YouTube videos summarized techniques for managing pediatric pain (72%), and discussed importance of managing pediatric pain (16%). The proposed presentation will report results from the full search strategy, discuss common information subjects about pediatric pain from Twitter and YouTube, and compare the social media posts with evidence-based research. This research will be a novel example of methods that can be used to search social media to understand how information about pediatric pain is being shared and discussed. This work will highlight how social media can be used to improve communication and sharing of information about pediatric pain.