In late 2007, I was contacted by a research group at The University of Rijeka School of Medicine in Croatia. This group was conducting a study of medical bloggers, their blogging habits, and their motivations for blogging. The study, entitled Examining the Medical Blogosphere: An Online Survey of Medical Bloggers, has been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JIMR), the "leading peer-reviewed transdisciplinary journal on health and healthcare in the Internet age".
To read this very interesting paper, please click here, and a slide show of the findings can be found posted on the blog of one of the article's lead authors.
I was honored to be involved as a anonymous subject of the survey, and feel that increased attention to the importance of blogging on the fields of medicine, nursing and healthcare is crucial at this time in history.
Blogging has indeed revolutionized journalism. It has also created a uniquely twenty-first century portal for the dissemination of information vis-a-vis the world of medicine from a variety of sources, filtered through the personal experiences of individuals within the healthcare field. Nursing is of particular interest to me, of course, and I can see that blogging has become a tool of empowerment for many nurses, allowing the profession yet another "voice of agency", to paraphrase Bernice Buresh and Suzanne Gordon, the brilliant authors of From Silence to Voice.
It is my hope that this survey and article by the team from The University of Rijeka will serve as an impetus for further study of the phenomenon of medical and healthcare blogging. I would also encourage researchers to more closely examine the more narrowly defined field of nurse bloggers, who have truly begun to find their collective voice over the last few years.
My thanks to the University of Rijeka team, and additional thanks to the Journal of Medical Internet Research for their recognition of the importance of blogging and its intersection with nursing, medicine, and healthcare.
1 comment:
Interesting survey. Thanks for the link.
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