Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Dec 4, 2022
Date Accepted: Apr 30, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 27, 2023
Public Opinions about Palliative and End-of-life Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Twitter-based Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Palliative and end-of-life care (PEoLC) played a critical role in relieving suffering and providing grief support in response to the heavy toll caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but little has been done to explore the public opinions related to PEoLC during the course of the pandemic. Social media may be a potential channel to collect real-time public discussion and understand public concerns.
Objective:
Use social media data to investigate real-time public feedback toward PEoLC during a public health crisis.
Methods:
A Twitter-based study exploring tweets across various English-speaking countries. From Oct 2020 to March 2021, 7,951 PEoLC-related tweets with geographical tags were retrieved and identified from a large-scale COVID-19 Twitter data set through Twitter API (Application Programming Interface). Topic modeling, realized through PMI-based co-occurrence network and Louvain Modularity, was utilized to examine latent topics across countries and two time periods (pre- and post-vaccination periods).
Results:
Commonalities and regional differences between the United States, United Kingdom and Canada were identified: (1) Cancer care and care facilities are of common interest to the public in these three countries during the pandemic. (2) Public showed positive attitudes towards the vaccine and especially highlighted its protection to PEoLC staff. (3) Twitter users would like to share their personal experiences about PEoLC in the online community during a health emergency, and users in the United States and Canada were more likely to share their experiences about PEoLC during the pandemic.
Conclusions:
The findings of this study corroborated some published statements in previous work, which validated social media could act as an effective tool to reflect public feedback in the context of PEoLC. In this post-COVID-19 era, PEoLC should make full use of social media and learn from online public discussion to ease the long-lasting trauma caused by this crisis and prepare for public health emergencies in the future.
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