The following are the conduct policies & procedures for participation in the MRI Safety Group page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/MRIsafety/):
Purpose:
The MRI Safety Group page is established for a singular purpose, to exchange information so that members of health care providers' organizations and professionals with a responsibility to MRI safety can continuously improve the safety and accessibility of MRI exams.
Affiliation:
The MRI Safety Group is not an affiliate of any group, society, board, company, or organization. Unless otherwise stated by an individual who posts / comments to the group, it is the presumption that all statements represent the thoughts, opinions, and expressions of the individual posting, and not any groups to which they belong or companies to which they are employed.
Professionalism:
The MRI Safety Group is a professional forum that happens to be on Facebook, not a Facebook group that happens to be about MRI safety. While not intended to curtail fun or lighthearted banter (in moderation), this distinction is important to understanding that the minimum expectation of all members is constructive input to our community.
Membership:
The MRI Safety Group page is open to any and all with an interest in MRI safety. This includes (but is not limited to) technologists / radiographers, physicians, nurses, physicists, researchers, equipment / device manufacturers, vendors, and patients. While membership is not restricted by profession or role, the forum's content is professionally focused (see 'Purpose', above).
Joining the Group:
Requests to join the group are submitted to the Administrators for review and approval. All requests for entrance, and even invitations from existing group members, require that the person invited / requesting admission to the group complete a simple statement of their interest(s) in MRI safety.
In an effort to reduce irrelevant, commercial, or 'spammy' posts to the group, the Admins may review the profiles of persons who request admission to the MRI Safety Group.
Making it less likely to be admitted:
- Persons who do not answer the 'statement of interest' question
- Profiles that have privacy settings such that they are not viewable.
- Persons who have joined an absurd number of groups.
- Persons who appear to use a profile for posting commercial / promotional material.
- Persons whose profiles don't idenfity an interest in radiology / MRI through employment, friends, or interests.
Making it more likely to be admitted:
- Persons with public parts of their profile (typically employment, education, pages 'liked', other groups joined, etc...) identify an interest in radiology and / or patient safety.
- A number of Facebook friends in the group.
If your Facebook profile is set up such that it does not have the information that would facilitate the administrators' review and acceptance and yet you wish to join the group, you may consider contacting one of the administrators, directly.
Pseudonyms:
Facebook, itself, technically does not allow pseudonyms for personal accounts. We, on the other hand, have no prohibitions against your use of a pseudonym. However, if you use a pseudonym or other mechanisms to conceal your identity for personal privacy, please know that transparency is a hallmark of this group. We do respect and will seek to protect the privacy of individuals who wish to use fictitious names for benign purposes in our group, but understand that the administrators want to know who you are. We ask that you introduce yourself (your real self) to the administrators in a private message when you join the group. If this slips your mind, and an administrator contacts you (privately) to ask for your identity, your continued participation in the group is contingent upon identifying yourself upon request. Use of a fictitious name to further abuse, harrassment, or otherwise unprofessional behavior will not be tolerated within the group. Failure to provide identifying information to the administrators when requested may be grounds for being removed from the group.
Closed Group:
Per Facebook, the MRI Safety Group is a "closed" group. This only means that persons who do not belong to the group can not see any of the content posted to the group, and does not imply a membership requirement (see "Membership" above). Though the closed status may inhibit outside parties from seeing what you post, there is nothing that can guarantee that information you post here will not somehow find its way ‘outside’ the group. Please be cognizant of this, and don’t post information that puts yourself or others in jeopardy of repercussions (legal or employment)… at least, not without the full knowledge of what it is that you’re doing.
Conduct:
The purpose of our group is to actively support and encourage questions and answers to MRI safety questions and to improve MRI patient care. It is important to recognize that our group is growing (by significant numbers) all the time, and questions that may have been asked 100 times previously are still brand new to a large number of newer members. It is expected that anyone who responds to questions posed will do so in a way that welcomes participation, actively shares resolutions (not 'why didn't you look that up, yourself' sorts of replies), and promotes dialogue / discussion.
Beyond that, once you have been admitted to our group;
You Are Encouraged To:
- Ask questions of our global community of MR practitioners and experts.
- Share your experiences relative to MR safety.
- Respond to questions or statements from others in the group.
- Recognize that MRI safety is a multi-faceted challenge, and that a variety of perspectives and issues are invited.
- Share information about our group’s content and mission, and invite your friends / colleagues to join us.
Many people around the world turn to this group both for help with specific situations and to provide explanations that might help them in the future. To the extent possible, when responding to questions about safety, please do not offer 'give a man a fish' answers, like "yes, we would scan that patient at our site." Instead, we ask that you provide 'teach a man to fish' answers, like, "here's how our site makes the determination that we will / won't scan patients like this." There are, quite simply, too many members of our group to support 'low information' responses without drowning-out the 'higher information' responses.
Please Be Careful When:
- Sharing information about relevant commercial products or services. (We encourage sharing of product information and events directly related to MRI safety -within limits- but never ‘sales pitches’, barrages of marketing, or denigration of competitors’ products / services.) Keep it 'public radio.'
- Wandering off-topic.
- Posting material in languages other than English. (We want this to be a global forum, so we won’t take down posts in other languages that are clearly related to MRI, but understand that it is difficult to moderate content posted in languages we don’t read / speak.)
- Posting job listings. If the job listing explicitly states a preference or requirement for advanced MR safety training, or MR Safety Certified™ (MRSC™) credentials (MRMD, MRSO, or MRSE), then you are welcome to post in the group. Listings that do not include those explicit stated preferences / requirements should be posted in groups other than the MRI Safety Group.
The occasional silly post, radiology joke, or even playful ribbing of friends and colleagues is a healthy thing for the group, but these should be the exception, and not the rule. Too much of this and these off-topic posts will be deleted. With the number of members we have, if each member shared only one off-topic post per year, that would be about 50-60 extraneous posts per day! Finding helpful information when you have to wade through 50+ irrelevant posts (per day) would quickly make this group unsuable.
You May Not:
- Seek personal medical advice / clinical opinion.
- Allow posts / threads to turn professional disputes into personal ones. Vigorous debate on safety issues is welcome. Personal attacks are not. ("I think that practice does not meet industry best practices, and could result in both injury and liability,' would be a good response, whereas 'that's the stupidest approach I've heard in years,' would not.)
- Disparage another group member. ('I'm not sure who you're speaking on behalf of,' would be fine, but 'classic misinformation from a self motivated mouth piece' would be wholly inappropriate.)
- Engage in any ad hominem attacks.
- Cast 'doubt bombs' into discussions and refuse to support / substantiate your position.
- "Gaslight" a conversation, individual, or subject.
- Use our group for the posting of any material not related to MRI safety, including:
- Unrelated commercial products or services.
- Politics (policy, such as 'this is the law or practice,' is appropriate as long as MRI safety relevant).
- Religion (other than to wish observers well for holidays or observances).
- Ionizing radiation safety, workplace safety, or other non-MRI safety posts are not ‘close enough’ for this group. Don't post them.
- ‘Case of the day’ or ‘wow, look at this’ or ‘what’s the differential’ types of non-safety scan / image posts.
- “What parameters should I be using” when not related to safety.
- If you've contemplated beginning a post with, "this is not safety related, but," then that post does not belong in the MRI Safety Group.
- Solicit for groups / activities / events which are not directly related to MR safety.
- Post any information to our group that identifies another person, particularly a patient, without their express consent.
- Share information from our group with outside parties in such a way that identifies specific members of our group (unless you prospectively obtain that member’s permission).
- Redirect members away from conversations in our group.
- If you're wanting to provide information that is rightly attributable to another source, please provide a summary / synopsis, if you can. You're also welcome to say, "I think the information you're looking for is _____, which I found on thisothersite.com" Please don't just link to thisothersite.com.
- If you want to share copyright information, or extensive information (scholarly papers, for example), please explain what the information you are sharing is, and then link to the resource.
- This is not meant to restrict the information shared in the group... only to provide as much information as is practical within the group.
- You may not use contacts established through this group in any attempt to direct people away from participating in the group (e.g., 'don't post your questions to the group, just send them to me, directly').
Blocking Admins:
The MRI Safety Group Page is successful in large part because of the ability of the administrators to moderate discussion and, when appropriate, contact individual members. Members of the group may be removed if they block one or more of the group administrators.
Resource Listing Reciprocity:
The administrators of the MRI Safety Group are pleased to have our platform used for the sharing of MRI safety information, and this includes products, services, meetings, conferences, resources, etc... We want this spirit of sharing for the greater good of our profession to be ubiquitous throughout the professional community. The expectation is that, at a minimum, non-profit organizations and societies that list or promote their resources on our group will open any public resources they maintain to other non-profit organizations that ask for the sharing of relevant resources.
This requirement for reciprocity does not compel any non-profit organization to set up public calendars, or resource pages that they don't currently have. It only means that if a non-profit already makes publicly available a resource, then as a condition of their resources / events being promoted on the Facebook MRI Safety Group, they need to make available their relevant public resources / event information to other non-profit entites. Non-profit groups or societies that do not follow our expectation of reciprocity may find their promotional announcements posted to the MRI Safety Group deleted.
If you have questions about whether a post would fit within these guidelines, you are invited to privately contact one of the group administrators prior to posting your message to ask.
Offending posts (off-topic, commercial, disparaging, unprofessional, etc…) will be deleted at the administrators’ sole discretion.
One of the most important features of this group is the members' interest in participating in discussions. Discussions may have comments disabled, or even be deleted, if it is felt that the discussion has devolved to a point where it is inhibiting the participation of others.
Individuals may be removed from the group and/or permanently banned at the administrators’ sole discretion. |