Using Social Media Listening to Understand the Pressure Injury Experience: A Qualitative Descriptive Study.

This study analysed public posts rather than recruiting patients, so people who do not use social media or do not post about pressure injuries are absent. Most posts were from observers and caregivers, not people with lived experience: 361 observer posts, 219 caregiver posts, and 86 posts from people with lived experience. Only English posts were included, and most came from the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada, so the findings may not apply to other settings. X yielded a disproportionately large number of posts compared with YouTube and Reddit, and X may encourage negative reporting, so the emotional tone may be skewed. The study could not obtain complete demographics such as age or sex, and it did not link posts to measured clinical outcomes. Observers, caregivers, and people with lived experience were analysed together, so subgroup differences were not examined. Hand coding may miss some mentions, and the study reports frequencies of posts or mentions, not prevalence in the wider population.

Funded by the University Health Network Foundation. The funders had no involvement in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not read reports of anger, poor care, or unmet needs as measured clinical outcomes. These are mentions in public posts, mostly from observers and caregivers, and the study cannot show how often these problems occur or whether any intervention changes them.