Testing the educational program “Primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular diseases” on the basis of social networking service Instagram

Aim. To study the possibility of conducting an educational program “Primary and Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD)”, aimed at increasing health literacy among followers of cardiology blogs on Instagram.

Material and methods. The methodology for conducting an educational program on Instagram included following items: the choice of agents of influence and the forms of engagement with audience; development of evaluation metric; carrying out he program; evaluation of the results obtained; defining a scaling strategy. The educational program was conducted daily from March 19 to March 30, 2020 on Instagram in following medical accounts: @doc_4_you, @zdorovye_serdtsa, @doctor_isaeva_cardio, @dr_cardioann, @doctor_savonina, @cardiolog.novikova, @doctor_lobzhanidze, @dnevnik.doctora, @doc.for.health, @aksenova_doctor. The format is publications of up to 4 thousand characters dedicated to informing people about primary (proper nutrition, quitting smoking, physical activity, obesity, vegetarianism) and secondary prevention (drug treatment) of CVD. The assessment of the results was carried out using descriptive statistics.

Results. The total number of followers of cardiology blogs is 367,727. The audience of professional doctors' accounts is mostly female (from 89 to 95%), the 25 to 34 age group accounts for 40 to 47% of followers. The total number of followers who read 10 publications of the educational program was 104 794; the total audience involvement (comments, reposts, likes, saves) was 9,692 people. The greatest involvement of people was revealed in the following topics — consumption of vegetables, salt and sugar, physical activity, obesity (1146, 1100, 2195, 1052, 1534 people, respectively).

Conclusion. The social networking service Instagram can be used to conduct educational programs aimed at improving the health literacy of Russian people. It is necessary to further improve the methodology for conducting research in social networks, in order to select the most effective technologies in this topic.

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