The series of conferences “Science for everyone’s understanding” in online format continues with a new conference, held by Doctor Mihai Craiu, professor at UMF Carol Davila and founder of the Virtual Children’s Hospital initiative, who spoke to us about the role and barriers of communication on medical topics in the age of social media.
Addressed to the public and science enthusiasts, the “Live Crisis Management” conference invites us to learn more on communication related to medical topics, fake-news and emotional states, unreasonable expectations and defensive medicine.
Dr. Mihai Craiu’s presentation is intended to be a review of the potential benefits of doctor-patient communication (parent in this case, as the guest is a pediatrician) in today’s Romania. Easy access to information and online media has changed the perspective of medical communication globally, regardless of the socio-economic status of the respective region. According to data from the International Telecommunication Union, in Romania there is more than one telephone per inhabitant. This very high access, correlated with an efficient broadband network (5th place in the world for fixed networks and 41st for mobile networks) places the Romanian patient in the position of great exposure to medical news of a very varied quality.
And because we are a country with an sensitive population, this wide access allows for the dissemination of rather inaccurate information. The Romanian patient, like any other patient in the world, has the tendency to first access the information in the online sources and only then turn to the family doctor, in the scenario where health problems arise; and the sources are not always the most authoritative or competent voices, despite the existence of numerous official entities or NGOs that want to increase the level of “health literacy”. It is well known that fake news circulates much more easily and has a much greater penetration capacity than accurate news, and in the medical field it seems to be even more severe.
Starting with the story of the Virtual Children’s Hospital, Dr. Craiu presents the difficulties he encountered in building this educational platform for parents in Romania. Memorable events, personal experiences and dilemmas are brought before the public in the hope of identifying possible strategies to improve the quality of health communication. Honesty, involvement and the presentation of validated options (and the data sources used in the argumentation) seem to be the tools that could shrink the current gap that separates patients from a good part of the medical body of our country.
Focusing on some aspects induced by the different perception of patients (very concretely illustrated by Lee Atwater’s formulation “Perception is reality”), Dr. Craiu evokes some communication difficulties in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emotions, but also constant stress (the “broken heart” of COVID19 is a reality, and overwork seems to become a constant of great relevance), distorts perception and influences decisions regarding the medical act. The World Health Organization has called this phenomenon of oversaturation with correct or incorrect information related to COVID-19 “infodemic”. And the experts tried to define it and bring solutions.
The message of the conference can be an optimistic one and evokes the need to improve the communication strategy, in accessible language (“patient”), with a dialogue partner, patient or parent, who can be involved in diagnostic or therapeutic decisions, using as a vector of Social Media information.
The full conference can be accessed here.
Doctor Mihai Craiu graduated from the Faculty of Pediatrics of UMF Carol Davila in 1989, then followed the steps of professional training in the Bucharest University Center and obtained through a competition the degree of specialist doctor in 1994 and that of primary doctor in 1998. From 1991 he became a teaching staff in the Department of Pediatrics of Emilia Irza Hospital (currently INSMC – National Institute for Mother and Child). He passed all the university degrees through the competition up to the current position of associate professor and head of Discipline 2 Pediatrics INSMC. During his professional training, he attended internships and advanced training courses in the UK (Wroxton College, Oxford), the Netherlands (Wilhelmina Kinderziekenhuis, Utrecht) and the USA (Kosair Children’s Hospital, Louisville, Kentucky).
He worked mainly in the Intensive Care Department of the INSMC and participated in the establishment of new clinical departments. At the time of the establishment of the INSMC CPU, in 2007, Dr. Craiu developed the concepts of staff structure and training (PALS courses and BLS/ALS modules), developing a module that currently ensures an annual triage of over 45000 patients. Since 2015, Dr. Craiu has led and developed the newly established Clinica V section with a profile of Pediatric Pneumology, with a Clinical Genetics department in its structure.
Dr. Mihai Craiu participated in numerous clinical studies in the field of pediatric pulmonology (international studies of asthma, pneumonia, cystic fibrosis, etc.), being sub-investigator or principal investigator in 14 such studies. He was involved in the European research project ARPEC (Antibiotic Resistance and Prescribing in European Children). At the same time, Dr. Mihai Craiu has published over 70 articles and chapters of specialized treatises, currently having 156 citations in indexed journals and an h-index of 5.
For three years, Dr. Craiu has been coordinating the activity of an educational project for social media, called the Virtual Children’s Hospital (SVC), which has over 197,000 followers. SVC’s impact on medical communication in the Romanian language was assessed as positive and was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the COPAC Gala 2017 and the 1st prize at the 7th European Vaccines Champion 2018 communication competition.
