The potential use of Social Media for Healthcare Advocacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo

7 pages•Published: October 25, 2019

Itulelo Matiyabu Imaja and Patrick Ndayizigamiye

Abstract

The healthcare system in the Democratic Republic of Congo is hampered by many challenges. Some of the challenges are due to the lack of effective mechanisms to disseminate public healthcare interventions widely. Social media, on the other hand, has proved to be effective in reaching a wide audience with specifically tailored messages. In the context of healthcare, social media enables healthcare professionals to get feedback from patients on specific health issues. Such feedback enables public healthcare stakeholders to devise adequate strategies to address specific healthcare issues. In addition, social media has been often hailed for rallying various stakeholders on a specific issue. Thus, social media has often been cited as one of the media to increase accountability and transparency in the public sector. This paper depicts the role that social media could play in public healthcare in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It portrays that social media could be used as a platform to inform the public about the national health agenda, current public health interventions at the provincial and peripheral levels and to collect feedback from citizens on the quality of healthcare. Such feedback could then be used to conduct research on how to improve current healthcare interventions.

Keyphrases: advocacy, democratic republic of congo, healthcare, social media

In: Kennedy Njenga (editor). Proceedings of 4th International Conference on the Internet, Cyber Security and Information Systems 2019, vol 12, pages 105-111.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/hnGb
	https://doi.org/10.29007/qwdw

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{ICICIS2019:potential_use_Social_Media,
  author    = {Itulelo Matiyabu Imaja and Patrick Ndayizigamiye},
  title     = {The potential use of Social Media for Healthcare Advocacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 4th  International Conference on the Internet, Cyber Security and Information Systems 2019},
  editor    = {Kennedy Njenga},
  series    = {Kalpa Publications in Computing},
  volume    = {12},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2515-1762},
  url       = {/publications/paper/hnGb},
  doi       = {10.29007/qwdw},
  pages     = {105-111},
  year      = {2019}}

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