Transcript
I’m so pleased to be joined here by Professor Richard Brady, based in Newcastle in the UK, a longtime pioneer of social media, professionally and consultant colorectal surgeon. Professor Brady, welcome.
Thanks very much, Daniel. Equally, I’m very impressed by the work that you’ve been doing in creations. We’ve been In contact now, think over 20 years is when we first met in Paris at innovation conference, Doctors 2 .0. And in those days, social media was just coming onto the scene. seeing what you’ve done with creation and how the company and yourself has evolved in terms of the precision and the data that you provide is really, really impressive to see. So I’m absolutely delighted to be back two decades later to have a chat with you again, given all the work that we’ve done over many decades.
Thank you. We’ve got lots of catch up on. Let’s kick off with this. Could you describe your current situation? Well, we can see a bit of the view. What’s the view from your chair?
Yeah, so I’m currently at home in Newcastle. So this is the key side of Newcastle. The Great River Tine is swaying away behind me underneath the famous bridges towards the Tine Mouth. And behind me is the courthouse in Newcastle. I live on the quayside. So it’s a great view and it inspires me to every day and every night when I get the sun just as like today. So yes, we’re in Las Vegas of the North in Newcastle, Boston, up on time. fantastic location.
So tell us a bit more about the background to you. What do you do? How long have you done it? How did you get into it?
Yeah, so my primary professional role is one of consultant colorectal surgeon. I’m a specialised robotics and particularly inflammatory bowel disease surgery with a large practice across the North of England. It’s a tertiary practice and deals with very complex cases which interests me. I also have a big role in research. So I run the local research group, the Newcastle Centre for Pile Disease Research Hub and I have an honorary professorship or visiting professorship with the Ulster University. So we do a lot of cross province, cross regional connections in terms of particularly commercial research. And I’m very keen to drive that so that companies have a space to approach the NHS to test new exciting wearables or new exciting junks to therapy. And we are hoping to provide that for as a competitive against other centers in the UK in Newcastle.
That sounds amazing.
Yeah, over many years now, we’ve been interested in social media. So we’ve been running the accounts for a number of different organizations and personally involved.
That’s amazing. And you’ve talked about you mentioned there was a few words jumps out at me, you mentioned robotics was exciting area, you mentioned wearables. So what for you is the what’s the most exciting thing happening in terms of advances in the treatments that you’re working in?
Yeah, I mean, the entire field of medicine is just so rapidly changing and it’s not doing it linearly. It’s a logarithmic scale of innovation, of investment from different quarters that one wouldn’t expect and of organization. So, gone are the days of traditional, you know, taking ages to have a diagnosis performed and provided, old style surgery with open large wounds. long inpatient stays after operating and then having to come back after many, many months on and on again to see your surgeon, that pathway has been disrupted quite significantly. So in diagnostics, we have much better scanners, much better markers of disease. Every day there’s new innovations in being able to detect early diseases before they become advanced and at a stage which surgery and therapy is more appropriate. We have new innovations like the detection of pull -ups by artificial intelligence with endoscopy. This takes off some of the routine tasks that can be very fatiguing for those that are involved in diagnostics. At large scale radiological examinations or pathological examinations used to require very highly experienced practitioners to sit in very dark offices. Often looking down a microscope or at a TV screen for many, hours. But the technology is within grasp now and is being tested around various centers in the UK where we can start to evaluate diagnostics by artificial intelligence interpretation or machine learning algorithms in order to provide those diagnostics more accurately and more robustly. So that’s very exciting. In surgery, mean, the field of Abdominal surgery is completely different. I use robotics when I can, both because of the better outcomes for the patient with less damage, very small, minimal incisions, but also for the surgeon. There are great musculoskeletal benefits in not bending over or having to hold straight stick laparoscopy for six to eight hours. And I think it would provide a longer professional lifetime for our surgeons. And post -operatively, having the ability to monitor patients in the community perhaps telemedicine clinics has been a real revolution since pandemic, when rules and regulations were relaxed and we started to innovate quite quickly to deal with the crisis that we had at that time.
That’s amazing. So sounds like, you know, what you’ve described is an incredibly rapid rate of advance of technology and approach and treatment. But it sounds like that’s actually also meaning that patients can get treated faster. So things are moving faster for patients too?
I would think so and I would hope so. Clearly when you detect disease earlier or more reliably, you generate more patients. And clearly we have a infrastructure issue in the NHS currently about treatments in terms of just having space, times and personnel in order to perform necessary tasks, which has led to waiting lists in many headlines that we know about. But I think you’re right. much better now at getting people into discernible, clear, efficient pathways. There’s a lot of work to be done. The NHS is a huge mammoth organization and changing one bit of it often has lots of effects on other parts of that organization. So these changes are coming through slowly and they’re being evaluated efficiently. and effectively, but it will still take probably a decade for a lot of these innovations to really add in for routine care.
Right. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So, you you’ve spoken about some of the challenges there in terms of what you mentioned waiting lists and, you know, NHS and taking time it takes to get things implemented. What do you think really are the sort of biggest challenges that are facing your area in terms of colorectal disease and so on? I guess you could say locally, nationally, maybe even globally, worldwide. What are the key challenges out there?
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a number of challenges. The first is the colorectal disease is not the glamour specialty. you know, I’m not, people don’t go into it for the glamour, the Hollywood plastic surgical type environment. It does take some time to try and gain attention and it does suffer as a result from funding allegation. think there’s less, or historically there have been less activity or pressure groups in relation to trying to gain funding into that area, particularly breast cancer, traditionally was very well funded, and colorectal cancer tended not to be, although recently there have been very high profile cases which have raised the profile of the disease process and We are finding that politicians are more and more interested in colorectal disease. One of the big issues is trying to equate within colorectal disease itself these chronic diseases which have been brewing
particularly for the last four to five years within the pandemic that have not had that priority. So cancer very much is prioritized across the UK, has very strong metrics. The organizations must report regularly their progress in this area. But when it comes to other chronic diseases like constipation or inflammatory bowel disease or diverticular disease, these are almost diseases which don’t appear on the metrics. And it’s startling when government are asked about the incidence of disease is high inaccurate, their own figures are. So it is just an unknown area and a known pandemic of disease, has yet to have further focus. I think engaging medical teams in those redesigned processes are really key and critical. There has been a slight disconnect over many years with the central command and front -face delivery. And that has resulted in quite a lot of breakdown of relationships between professionals and central government, which has resulted in industrial action, but hopefully, we’re now moving into a situation where things are becoming more collaborative. And we all know that there’s a very important job to be delivered.
So it sounds like a lot of this challenge is in part a communications challenge. You talked about the fact that know, colorectal disease is not kind of glamorous, people don’t get into it for the glamour. But actually, there’s a sense in what you’re saying that awareness and awareness raising and profile raising is is really important actually for putting these things on the agenda.
Absolutely. And linking to our reason for being on this podcast, and I think quite clearly issues like networking with patients or doctor patient interaction online. It’s a really, really interesting area. you know, social media is one of these really powerful tools of being able to get congregations of people together who are interested in a particular subject in order to try and pursue the aims and deliveries of that of their aims and aspirations. There are many hashtags which patients congregate around. We have in colorectal surgery developed our own for colorectal surgeons. been several iterations and different subspecialty hashtags which have since taken over. which have done very well as well. But I think it’s that ability to get the jungle drum to beat very quickly across the land and for people to get the message very quickly, which has really revolutionized communication within our profession.
And you’ve been using social media for long time. I mean, you, I see you as one of the early pioneers. We’re now tracking millions of healthcare professionals on social media, but in the early days, there you were being active, getting communication out there. How important has social media been for you in your work? And I suppose in the opportunities you’ve had to bring new innovation or to share that innovation and so on.
Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty much been vital, I have to say. I think I just came along at the right moment and just recognized that this was definitely going to be one of these transformational technologies that I had been at the beginning of app technology and I had seen it sort of rise where we thought everyone was going to have apps. And then it sort of staggered and didn’t really find connection. But this, with the advent of the iPhone and everyone having social media on their mobile phone, it became really easy during that decade then to get connected with other people in the profession, patients or students. And that revolutionized communication where the traditional hierarchy of communication broke down and we had a much more flattened landscape of discovery. So from my point of view, over the years, I’ve used social media extensively for many, many reasons. We’ve held journal clubs where we can discuss interesting papers online and great engagement. We have disseminated our own research and then found collaborators to work with us across many sites in the UK. We’ve actually undertaken research to look at whether social media has an effect on published research and find a very positive effect. I have had patient interactions online, although I’m still not that encouraging of it, partially because the rules surrounding this are very strict for medical professionals. And actually, I tried to refer them back into more formal communication pathways, simply because this is where we are with UK law and regulations at present.
do you think that you find it more straightforward or more useful, more practical to use social media for actually engaging with peers with our healthcare professionals?
I think certainly, yeah, I think certainly the history has been that engagement with other professionals has grown with their trust in the media. So clearly in the early days, people were kind of very anxious about some scandal stories coming about, MPs or business owners who really didn’t have experience of social media and used it in eloquently. I think it’s the best way we could describe it. I have to say that over time, senior doctors have relaxed. They have understood that if they are professional in their use of the media, then they very rarely go wrong. But there have been some issues over the years that have frightened people about being engaged in social media. It’s a generational issue. Certainly young trainee students and doctors have grown up with this media. It is part of their lives. It’s a critical part of how they network and interact engage with others and it will form part of their education, their training, how they find information, how they interact with each other going forward. More wise or more experienced doctors towards the end of their career probably look at the risk of that interaction and are more concerned about trying to reduce that risk because they’re often experienced essentially.
That makes sense. I suppose that’s the same with anything actually, that often the younger people are kind of more open to risk, less risk averse. And as we get older, we calm down a bit maybe. But for you, what does it look like on a day -to -day basis, practically? How do you use social media? What does it look like?
Well, know, Daniel, at the age of 45, I’m practically dead in terms of this generational issue. clearly, you know, I’m seen as one of the elderly statesman of this kind of environment, which is a shame because that’s not how I feel. But that is the reality of the situation. I think on a daily basis, I’ll check social media to see what peers are up to see who’s been publishing research, see what you know, looking at what centers are advertising for fellows or jobs in order to tell my trainees or others about them. There’s a really vibrant environment of research collaboration within surgery within the UK. which uses social media as a backbone in order to deliver very large scale studies across many NHS sites and even over Europe sites, which would never have been able to be materialized or realized in single site institutions previously. So there’s a large number of those and training collaborators have been very much involved in the development of that kind of technology and that kind of culture within research.
So it actually plays a role. in the development advancement of medical science effectively because you’re able to use social media to achieve outcomes in order to achieve a scale of research that might not have been possible otherwise?
Absolutely critically. social media’s role within research is almost applicable at every stage. So you can have a research idea and discuss that openly with collaborators online. You can create a research group who will take your research program forward online. You can recruit other centers or interested researchers by advertising your research. You can recruit patients. You can get patients to feedback about your trial and you can disseminate the results of your studies afterwards so that a vastly larger global audience can have access to your research. So it’s been transformational, but its utility is really powerful, particularly within the field of research.
Amazing. Can you think of a specific example of that that’s happening currently or recently that’s happened and say this is where you can get to that kind of tangible outcome?
Yeah, just that. mean, there’s a number of examples. In my own research in Newcastle, we were struggling with a research study which was focusing on stoma and its outcomes. And we use social media to recruit very successfully. In fact, once we opened up from the traditional nurse -led recruitment in clinic, we’ve seen that recruitment numbers really took off. So we’re really pleased by that. And Newcastle has a tradition of social media recruitment into large -scale trials and very successfully within the field of irritable bowel syndrome as well. There are also studies that are actually patient -led in colorectal surgery, looking at sexual performance and sexual impact of colorectal disease and colorectal operations. And those studies are patient -led recruiting patients online by patient ambassadors, and have really provided incredible insights into the kind of metrics that are important for patients. And so it’s okay for surgeons to say, well, you know, I’ve had a successful operation, patients being discharged, no infections, et cetera. But those are not the metrics that actually are important to patients, very much in relation to their sexual function, highly fevered by themselves, their body, and reach afterwards. These metrics were really well recorded in a study that was undertaken by patients, for patients, but disseminated on social media.
Amazing, amazing. So if another healthcare professional, let’s say another surgeon, hears some of this and thinks I’d really like to grow, you know, my knowledge and the impact that I have online, what advice would you give them?
Yeah, I mean, looking back, if I look at how I grew, it’s essentially you can’t really be an island in this kind of in this ocean of information. It’s useful to have connections to link with people already out there who are of a similar interest or similar nature. we try to make a connection to them, have a conversation with them and try and come up with a campaign or if you’re trying to organize a community about a particular subject. and try to come up with some rules, .e. who’s going to post, what are you going to post, what’s your hashtag going to be, are people going to find you. And that’s how we grew a number of our very successful online communities into the size that they were. But it was hard back in many of the presentations over two decades now to the words of Faris Tamimi, who used to be the medical director of the Mayo Institute of Social Media. And he had these, the saying, don’t lie, don’t… cry, don’t cheat, can’t delete, don’t steal, don’t reveal. And those crystal kind of commandments that really should guide your interactions online, having positivity with keeping yourself safe and always remember that you’re, you I always imagine that whatever I post on social media is to a room of a hundred patients. And if you keep that in your mind, then often you will not go very far wrong. The difficulty is culture has changed on social media has become a bit more of an aggressive area. There’s a lot more mobbing going on. There’s a lot more canceling going on. And I think that that is a bit of a pity, given where we have come from and where we are going to. I think navigating that, particularly for surgeons who are already a little bit nervous about it can be somewhat of a challenge.
So it’s really that sense of remembering not losing sight of the very public nature of that social media conversation.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
So what would you do differently if you were if you were starting over in kind of building your online impact? Were there any things that you’d say, well, I would definitely do this differently.
I think I was slightly nervous at the beginning and a lot of self doubt. And probably what I should have done is just gone stronger, faster, harder into the area. And what I mean by that is that we should have really got a very active group of individuals who were very keen around me and I was blessed by having that in the early days. But I think that by delegating certain areas like education or training or research or interactions or networks to particular individuals to try and run on a network would be very useful because one person can’t do that all. Secondly, I think I probably would have appealed to other age groups. So The surges of tomorrow are the medical students of today and certainly in the previous guise of our social media channels that was always aimed at working professionals. Probably we didn’t spend enough time trying to encourage those who were going to be here very soon be our next users. But when you’re in midst of a wave of innovation, you’re not quite sure how long it’s going to last or whether it will die. And clearly Twitter or X had a had a potential just a few years ago of collapsing. So and it may well do in the future. So all of these things, like the sounds of time, can be very variable.
Well, let me just ask you a little bit about Twitter. You know, there’s been a lot of, you say, the last couple of years, a lot of discussion about where’s Twitter going? it, does it turn into chaos? Is it, are we going to stay using Twitter? Is it still a valuable part of your day to day professional social media life?
It is. I find that there is still quite an active core population on Twitter for my specialty. Other specialists tend to co -locate around groups on Facebook or LinkedIn, particularly for orthopedics, Facebook for those with an interest in hernia surgery, a very avid population. So it’s just the way that those populations have evolved and the users involved in those communities. How do I see it kind of change over time? I think They need to not mess around with the rules too much. think in addition to that, the complete removal of editorial services or policing of the platform at present, which is a cost issue for Elon Musk, you know, that’s how he’s reduced his workforce by 80%. I think it comes with a risk that the environment becomes so toxic or unregulated that actually finding positivity or good news becomes a major challenge and watching the culture of Twitter and social media progress over time has not filled me with a lot of faith in that there’s a long term survival for this as a communication means between professionals. I guess they might just move or migrate to other platforms that have more rules.
When you see content, whether it’s on Twitter or any other social media platform, that is know, that you think is not suitable for the community, or perhaps even, you know, there’s been a lot of talk about misinformation and disinformation on social media. Do you, to what extent do you feel you have a responsibility to do something about that? To respond to that in some way?
I think all professionals do. So, but that doesn’t come without significant impact. Some people are avidly unifocal about their point of view. And one of the things we’ve lost as a culture is the ability to have open, transparent debate without offense or people getting defensive. And I think, you know, I kind of look back to the great debates of the 19th century, 18th century, those who had great knowledge could get in a room and really robustly argue at points of view without fear or offense. That’s gone, I think, in social media, and one has to be so careful. In terms of addressing fake news, then I think professionals do have a responsibility to do that. However, you know, it’s not our role. It comes with a lot of hassle, and you can be targeted when that happens. And I think you just have to tread very carefully. My approach has always been that if you amplify the message of someone who’s clearly either disseminating fake news or harmful content, then
in a way you’re almost giving fuel to the fire. So I tend to try to either ignore it or point or post content that is more informative or evidence -based. So lead with the stuff that you really want to get out there.
Great. Professor Brady, thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience with us. Just one final question. Where can people find you online?
My Twitter is research active or any multitude of platforms including Instagram or LinkedIn. And I look forward to engaging with any new followers that come that way. But congratulations yourself, Daniel, and good luck going forward with the company.
