Alberta Health Services (AHS) considered hiring social media influencers to assist with its advertising to raise awareness about various health topics. AHS said in a since-deleted post on social media influencer platform Embold obtained by CTV News Calgary it was looking to hire influencers for a campaign called Plan Your Health 2024. AHS admitted it wanted influencers to educate people about how to treat their children at home rather than the emergency room, fitness, quitting smoking, lung cancer screening and Health Link 811. With this post, it said it was erroneous and premature. However, it did confirm it had been researching the idea of recruiting influencers. At this time, it said no details have been confirmed and no influencers retained. Royal Alexandra and Stollery Children’s Hospital emergency physician Dr. Shazma Mithani said it should move forward with this plan. “Every avenue available to try to get health information that’s credible out to people needs to be used,” said Mithani. “Since the pandemic, we’ve seen such a massive rise in misinformation in the world of media and social media.”At the moment, Mithani said it is “so important to now, in particular, have people who have appropriate training and credentials to be out there to try to cut through that noise of misinformation.”In her free time, she posts informational health videos to her 15,000 Instagram followers. The goal she has with these videos is to help people stay out of the emergency room. “At a time where the emergency departments in the entire province, the entire country, are very stressed, I decided to use my expertise and use my platform on social media to arm people with the information they need to decide, ‘Is this something I can manage at home? Can I call 8-1-1 for this?’” she said.Canadian public health physician Dr. Jia Hu agreed health organizations should look at innovative ways to get critical information out to the public. “It is the 21st century and I think the better we are at reaching people where they actually are, the more effective we’ll be at getting people healthier,” said Hu. Hu has some experience doing innovative campaigns, having launched public health non-profit 19 to Zero during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nineteen to Zero works to improve people’s health by changing their behaviour around topics such as vaccine update and cancer treatment. He acknowledged it has done a number of campaigns. “Some are sort of mainstream media, like TV and radio, some are very social media related,” he said. “I love seeing health do more of this because I think that traditional messaging doesn’t always work or is insufficient.”The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) questioned how much it would cost AHS to hire influencers. “No matter how big or how well-paid our government employees are, they still manage to take taxpayers’ money and fling it out the door to other people,” said CTF Alberta Director Kris Sims. “In this case, we’re not convinced that influencers are the answer when it comes to people making good healthcare choices.”Records published on Thursday indicated Health Canada had paid more than $680,000 to Twitter influencers since 2021.READ MORE: Trudeau gov’t paid Twitter influencers $682,000Social media influencers received payment to show support for government programs without revealing they were paid for their posts.“Expenditures relate to work by an agency including planning, material development, influencer outreach and liaison, updates, content monitoring, evaluation and management of payments to influencers,” said cabinet.
