A review of public perceptions about nurses communicated via Twitter in Turkey

Objectives: Social media platforms such as Twitter allow people to openly express theirviews about many topics, including the nursing profession. COVID-19 is currently a fre-quently searched and discussed topics on Twitter. This study was performed to iden-tify the image of nursing in the social media before and during COVID-19 pandemic inTurkey, and to review of public perceptions about nurses’ communication on twitter inTurkey.Design: This study was conducted using content analysis with a sample of tweetsposted on Twitter before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Codes were created,including expressions of respect, anxiety, violence, gratefulness, anger, positivity, andnegativity.Results: Findings showed that 35.65% of the 373 tweets posted prior to the COVID-19pandemic were positive while 64.35% were negative. During the pandemic 91.94% ofthe 1006 tweets were positive and 8.06% were negative.Conclusion: The results of this study suggests that public opinion about nurses, asreflected on Twitter during the COVID 19 pandemic, was positive.