Hashtags and heroes: perceptions of nursing on Twitter following a high profile nurse arrest

The purpose of this research was to extract the perceptions of nursing by analyzing Twitter tweets following a high-profile nurse arrest.

A Utah registered nurse arrest was covered extensively on national and international news programming and social media, including Twitter.

Tweets related to arrest were retrieved and analyzed by text analysis techniques, Latent Dirichlet Allocation models and sentiment analysis.

56,931 consisting of 14,150 unique tweets we retrieved. Twelve topics were identified, of which four related to nursing: nurses as protector, protecting the protector, nurses as innocent victim, and nurses as important team member. "Trust" (44.3%) was assigned to the majority of tweets.

To our knowledge, this is the first study examining the perceptions of nursing in Tweets. Social media provides a powerful resource to strengthen general perceptions of the nursing profession and has implications for education and outreach.