LAUSR

Type of funding sources: None. Purpose. To study the possibility of conducting the ‘Primary and Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Diseases’ educational programme aimed at promoting health literacy among cardiology blog followers on Instagram. Material and methods. In the present study the methodology for conducting the educational programme on Instagram included the following: choosing the agents of influence and format of audience engagement; determining the most relevant topics and time frames; identifying the frequency and characteristics depending on the selected format of audience engagement; developing evaluation metrics; conducting the programme; evaluation of study results; defining the scaling strategy. The educational programme was conducted daily from 19 to 30March 2020 through professional medical accounts on Instagram. The programme format included posts of up to 4,000 characters on primary (healthy diet, smoking cessation, physical activity, obesity, vegetarian diet) and secondary prevention (drug treatment) of cardiovascular diseases. The study results were evaluated by descriptive statistics for standard social network metrics. Results. The total number of cardiology blog followers is 367,727. The audience of professional doctors" blogs is mostly female (89 to 95%), the age group of 25 to 34 years accounts for 40 to 47% of the followers. Ten posts of the educational programme were viewed by a total of 104,794 users, gathering a total of 9,692 audience engagements (comments, shares, likes and saves). Such topics as consumption of vegetables, salt and sugar, physical activity and obesity accounted for the highest audience engagement (1,146; 1,100; 2,195; 1,052 and 1,534 users, respectively). Conclusions. The Instagram social network can be used for educational programmes aimed at promoting health literacy among Russian people. It is necessary to further improve the methodology for conducting research in social networks in order to select the most effective technologies that contribute to the preservation of public health.