Social media offers opportunities for us to engage with different audiences, including the public, patients, and our communities and to share more about the fantastic work our people do.
In addition, as a category one responder, we have a duty to warn, inform and advise the public in an emergency and social media can help us to share those messages when needed.
We want our social media channels to be an online space where people feel they can interact with our content and each other.
We request that anyone interacting with our social media channels respects our Trust values of Kindness, Courage and Integrity.
How we use social media
Our main South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SECAmb) social media accounts are accessed and monitored by our Communications Team Monday to Friday, from 8:30am – 5pm.
Posts are also scheduled to go live outside of these hours.
Our SECAmb social media accounts are:
What we will do:
If you follow us on social media, we do not automatically follow back. Being followed by our accounts, using hashtags or mentioning does not imply endorsement of any kind.
We will share or retweet content which we feel is useful or interesting to our audiences.
If you contact us, we aim to respond to your message/comment on the same day (during working hours). There may be times where we can’t get back to you on the same day – we will respond as soon as we can.
We try to monitor all mentions, @replies, posts, comments, and direct messages sent to us but can’t and won’t reply to every individual message we receive. If you have a query which we can support with, then we will get back to you and may request further information. Your query may be answered through our automatic reply so we may not respond back in this case.
We may ask you to send a private message to us with your contact details, particularly when it’s not appropriate for us to respond on social media. This means the right person can follow up with you about your question or concern.
We will treat your message with the politeness you’d expect if you were dealing with us face-to-face or on the telephone.
What we won’t do
We won’t discuss any individual’s care through social media.
We don’t deal with complaints through social media. If you contact us via social media to raise a complaint, we will signpost you to the complaints information page on our website.
We don’t answer clinical or medical questions, but we’ll do our best to signpost where to get information, advice, or support as appropriate.
What we ask from you
We ask that you are courteous and treat each other and all of our people with respect when interacting on our social media channels.
Please:
When we will take action
Everyone is entitled to share their views and we won’t remove a post simply because it is negative. However, if we feel an interaction goes against our principles, we may need to act:
If you have any questions about our social media or feel a post may have been taken down unfairly, email comms@secamb.nhs.uk
September 2024