The Twitter journal club for Medical Radiation Professionals (#medradjclub): CPD/CE for the 21st century

Objectives There is a growing trend towards the use of online journal clubs amongst healthcare professionals as a means of sharing knowledge, discussing evidence in an accessible form of continued professional development (CPD). In March 2015, the Medical Radiation Journal Club was founded to run monthly Twitter-based journal critique and discussion. The Twitter journal club is aimed at all medical radiation professionals. The hour-long meetings are based on a key selected theme relevant to all medical radiation technologists, with one key study chosen from the literature and supplemented by suggested reading. The objective of this study was to examine the progression and development of this initiative over the initial 12 months.

Methods Tweets including the journal club hashtag (#medradjclub) were analysed for each session through third party services, Symplur (www.symplur.com) and Keyhole (www.keyhole.com). Available information included total tweet count, total participants, total impressions and country of tweet origin.

Results Provisional analysis indicates that there is a core group of consistent participants, with others joining for topics relevant to their area of practice. The initial trend is for relatively consistent volumes of tweets and impressions across the chats. The Twitter journal club has a global reach, typically 500+ tweets per hour and a total reach in the order of 1000000 per session.

Conclusions Online journal clubs provide a forum for promotion of evidence based practice, academic debate and professional networking, free from traditional physical boundaries. Analysis of the first twelve months of #MedRadJclub demonstrates consistent participation and global reach, and is an accessible, interactive platform for discussion of research and practice in this field. The Twitter journal club is consistent with globalisation and internationalisation strategies amongst the medical radiation technology professions.