Written by Dr Mark Taubert and Dr Jacob Strand

Welcome to a new feature in BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care, a dedicated social media section. Our aim is to highlight interesting developments in matters that bring together palliative and supportive care with the enormous world of social media. The breadth of postings that occur daily on social media websites is significant and as such this section will not pretend to be a comprehensive summary.  Our BMJ SPC Twitter feed will provide a focused digest of what some of our readers, subscribers and followers may find interesting in the world of palliative care.

In addition, we will curate a dedicated section of the website and journal, similar to the ‘Shortcuts’ section, that link to interesting worldwide research articles trending on social media.  Hopefully even print readers will enjoy a taste of debates in our field that are occurring online, and it might inspire such journal users to engage further in the social media discussion. Our ‘Top Tweets’ section, which will become a regular feature, will focus solely on interesting Twitter posts but this may be expanded to other social media domains.

Healthcare professionals have an increasingly important role in trying to bring some balance and perspective to many of the topical debates in all areas of life. Social Media can provide a valuable snapshot on some interesting and perhaps more specialist discussions about what the general public, the journalistic media, patients, carers, politicians, healthcare professionals and researchers, amongst many others, are saying. Feel free to contact us if you would like us to consider including information about newer trends in social media and end-of-life care that may suit this particular section of the journal.

Our Five Top Tweets: here are some recent postings that we found highly relevant: