Hospitals are institutions whose primary task is to treat patients. Family-centered care, which considers loved ones as equal partners in patient care, has been gaining recognition in the adult care setting.

Our aim was to record experiences of and opinions on communication between hospital-based healthcare providers and patients’ loved ones, related but not limited to the rigorous mitigation measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Twitter profile @HospitalsTalkTo and hashtag #HospitalsTalkToLovedOnes were created to interact with the Twitter public between 7 June 2021 and 7 February 2022.

Conversations surrounding #HospitalsTalkToLovedOnes were extracted and subjected to natural language processing analysis using term frequency and Markov chain analysis.

Qualitative thematic analysis was performed on the 10% most interacted tweets and of tweets mentioning “COVID” from a personal experience-based subset.

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