VIIth Nerve

The objectives of this study are to:
• To use social media to connect medical students worldwide in a network that facilitates peer communication and resource sharing.
• To establish 'best practice models' for emerging social media platforms in clinical learning and teaching for medical students.
• To increase knowledge and insight into the tools that students find most beneficial throughout their undergraduate medical education.
• To determine how social media can effectively be implemented into medical education to prepare students for clinical clerkship and lifelong learning. The popularity of social networks, including facebook, is rising, however healthcare is one of the last industries to embrace the trend (Squazzo 2010). Students are well connected with mobile devices that allow access at their fingertips to resources and "anytime, anywhere" learning (Squazzo 2010). These tools allow users in remote areas to feel connected to larger training hospitals, peers and mentors (Boulos et. The VII Nerve page was created for medical students to centralize resources and facilitate peer-communication. The page is capable of sharing medical education tools such as videos, apps, sounds and research articles. Demographics of users, visits to the page, type of posts and total number of users is tracked through facebook and analyzed. Future steps of the study include conducting focus groups to determine usefulness and challenges of social media in medical education. Sixty-two percent of subscribers are female and 89 percent fall between the age of 18 and 34. Users are from nine countries worldwide and eight different first languages are indicated. Users are most engaged by videos clips and greater than 75 percent of users have returned to the site. The VIIth nerve is effectively connecting students internationally. Synergies between social networks and medicine is vastly underrepresented in the literature. The implications of social media in the learning environment may be of significant value and affect the future practice of medicine. This research will increase knowledge and insight into the tools that students find beneficial and how social media can effectively be implemented to prepare students for clinical clerkship and lifelong learning.