Recruiting Medical Students for a First Responder Project in the Social Age: Direct Contact Still Outperforms Social Media

Marx, David; Greif, Robert; Egloff, Mike; Balmer, Yves; Nabecker, Sabine (2020). Recruiting Medical Students for a First Responder Project in the Social Age: Direct Contact Still Outperforms Social Media. Emergency medicine international, 2020, p. 9438560. Hindawi Publishing Corporation 10.1155/2020/9438560

Preview

Text (In-house original article) Marx Greif_Recruiting Medical Students for a First Responder Project in the Social Age_Em Med Int_2020.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY). Download (1MB) | Preview

Introduction: Efficient recruitment of first responders (FRs) is crucial for long-term success of any FR project. FRs are laypersons who are trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), medical professionals, and firemen, police officers, and other professions with a duty of help. As social media are widely used for rapid communication, we carried out a prospective observational study to test the hypothesis that recruitment of FRs via social media is more efficient than recruitment via direct face-to-face contact.

Methods: Following ethics committee agreement, we informed 600 medical students about becoming FRs when they attended a didactic lecture about the FR project or during their mandatory CPR-course. Furthermore, recruitment was opened to medical students through Facebook, which accessed ∼1,000 medical students to see if they expressed interest in becoming FRs. All of the recruited students successfully completed the FR training. We then used an online questionnaire to ask these students how they had been recruited.

Results: Out of 63 registered student FRs, 59 responded to the online questionnaire. Overall, 15.3% of these FR students were recruited via social media. The majority (78.0%) were recruited through direct contact.

Conclusions: Despite widespread use of social media, over three-quarters of these medical students were recruited to the FR project via direct personal contact. This suggests that the advantage of a larger reachable population using social media does not outweigh the impact of personal contact with experts.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

83 since deposited on 30 Jun 2020
27 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item