Use of social media by healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia: reasons and usefulness for their professional development

Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the use of social media by healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia, and the reasons and usefulness for their professional development. In order to carry out this cross-sectional study it was distributed an online survey among 400 healthcare providers from different hospitals. More than half of the respondents were females and belonged to different cities from Saudi Arabia. 29% of the healthcare providers worked as allied health personnel, 28% of them were nurses, 19% physicians, 13% pharmacists and 13% administrative personnel. The respondents used the following social media: Instagram (52%), Twitter (51%), WhatsApp (50%), Snapchat (50%), YouTube (49%), Facebook (31%), LinkedIn (3%) and Telegram (2%). The key reasons for using social media were new actualizations (53%), knowledge sharing (51%), networking (32%) and professional development (29%).