Activity on Facebook pages of Family Health Units of the Porto Metropolitan Area in a COVID-19 year

• Autor(a) principal: Correia, André Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por; eng
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira de Medicina de Família e Comunidade (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://www.rbmfc.org.br/rbmfc/article/view/2931
• topic: Online social networking; Communication; Health centers; Delivery of Health Care; COVID-19.; Redes sociais online; Comunicação; Centros de saúde; Atenção à saúde; COVID-19.; Redes sociales en línea; Comunicación; Centros de salud; Atención a la salud; COVID-19.

Introduction: Lately, social networks have been enabling new forms of interaction between people and institutions and the scalable sharing of contents from different areas, although not always reliable. Objective: To characterize the presence of Facebook pages of Family Health Units (FHU) of the Porto Metropolitan Area (Portugal) as of December 2020, its metrics of age, followers, publications, and interactions in a given time interval, and its distribution by organizational model (Family Health Units A and B) and Health Center Group; to verify the trend of creating pages in 2020 (first year of the COVID-19 pandemic); and to assess the topics addressed by the 50 publications of the last 60 days with which people interacted the most. Methods: This is an exploratory, cross-sectional, descriptive, and analytical study in which Facebook pages of Family Health Units of the Porto Metropolitan Area were individually assessed on December 30, 2020 and respective metrics for an interval of 60 days of activity were obtained from the Fanpage Karma platform. Frequencies, intervals, means, and medians were estimated and parametric and nonparametric tests were applied. Results: Of the 135 operating Family Health Units (FHU–B: 64%), 53% had an active page (FHU–B: 61%, p<0.05), ranging between 0 and 81.3% of the Family Health Units in each Health Center Group, created in the last ten years (median 4.6 years, FHU–A 1.5 versus FHU–B 5.3, p<0.05), increasing 44% in 2020. The number of followers is heterogeneously distributed among different Family Health Units and Health Center Groups, although without differences between Family Health Units models, not exceeding 1,000 in 69% of pages and only five pages reaching more than 2,000 followers. Of the active pages, 75% (54/72) posted an average of 0.3 times a day for the last 60 days. There are no significant associations between number of followers or between FHU A and B models and time of the last publication or number of publications at 60 days. During that time, 15,913 interactions were generated (average of 18.8 per publication). When analyzing the 50 publications with most interactions in the last 60 days, there is a predominance of topics related to COVID-19, organizational and bureaucratic issues, remarkable events related to the Family Health Units, and COVID-19 vaccine promotion/information. Conclusions: It was verified that Family Health Units have not been sufficiently exploring the communicative and collaborative potential of social networks (although it has increased in a pandemic year). With room for advancement, social networks can constitute a complementary and interactive tool for promoting access to and improving the quality of services, combating misinformation, empowering citizens for health, and improving health outcomes.