Student Blog
BAPEN Public Health Placement
Bonnie Federico, Lucy Touche, Gabriella Greenhouse and Ashley Kotalik (@BAPEN_prereg)
BAPEN has been offering public health placements to pre-registration dietitians since January 2020. The main focus is to build an Instagram platform to support and educate other pre-registration healthcare professionals on matters relating to malnutrition. On placement, students get to develop their professional skills and experience with social media and public health messaging.
After discussing the placement with our lovely supervisor Emily, we decided on three key aims: 1) promote education of malnutrition risk in all health professions; 2) increase follower-ship diversity to include a range of health professionals; and 3) generally grow follower base and engagement.
Our strategy for achieving these goals was to create a series of posts, each focusing on a different health profession, to provide individualised and practical information about malnutrition screening and intervention. The idea behind this approach was to specifically target pre-registration practitioners and visually draw them into the content where they previously may have thought it didn’t apply to them.
In order to assess if the content proved useful, a poll was carried out prior to the posts being published and then again at the end of the series to see how the answers changed. Our quiz questions about malnutrition screening tools and responsibility both saw an increase in correct answers, and overall reported confidence in malnutrition screening improved. Additionally, we went from 200 to 301 followers, that’s a 50% increase!
This placement was an excellent professional experience in using social media, which is only becoming more relevant in our future practice as dietitians and as general public health advocates. The team at BAPEN were especially supportive and guided us throughout the project. We received excellent advice for developing our health communication skills as well as educating us on the corporate technicalities of social media, such as accessibility, copyright law, and content appropriation.
