Maternity clinic going online: Mothers' experiences of social media and online health information for parental support in Finland

Abstract

Social support and health information are important elements in maternity care preventive and counseling services, and the internet has a potential role in supporting those services. In a pilot service innovation study, a web service offering social media tools and health information for parental support was created as an extension to the standard preventive and counseling services provided by a local primary care maternity clinic in Finland. In this exploratory qualitative study we examined the experiences of mothers of infants (n = 7) of using the virtual service. This study showed that social media coordinated by a maternity clinic can effectively create a sense of virtual community, or a feeling of belonging to a group, and respond to the needs for social support of parents with small children. At the same time, there seemed to be less utility to the mothers derived from the health information made available through the service. This pilot study demonstrated the importance of understanding virtual health service users in their everyday life context, as the utility they derive from the service is largely affected by it.