The News
CPSO issued updated Advice to the Profession guidance on physician use of social media, published July 21, 2026. The advice reinforces that physicians must maintain professional and respectful boundaries with patients, people closely associated with patients, and any medical students or postgraduate trainees they supervise, across every platform.
The most practical piece is about patient connection requests. CPSO advises physicians to think carefully before accepting a follow, friend, or connect request from a patient, because the power imbalance in the physician-patient relationship means a patient may feel pressured to say yes even when they would rather not connect. The relevant factors are the type of clinical care provided, how long and how intensive the relationship is, and how vulnerable the patient is. CPSO also notes that running a separate professional account, kept free of personal content, is one of the more effective ways to engage with patients online without compromising the therapeutic relationship.
Source: CPSO, “Advice to the Profession: Social Media,” July 2026. cpso.on.ca
MAP’s Take
This is exactly the kind of guidance that sounds like common sense until you are the one deciding whether to accept a friend request from a longtime patient who just wants to stay in touch. CPSO is not telling physicians to disappear from social media. It is telling them to be deliberate about how personal and professional presence intersect.
That deliberateness is the whole game, and it is where a lot of practices get it wrong without meaning to. A personal account that occasionally posts practice updates is not the same thing as a professional account built for that purpose. The first invites exactly the kind of blurred-boundary situation CPSO is flagging. The second gives physicians a clean way to stay visible and approachable to patients without opening up a personal feed, personal opinions, or personal photos to people they treat.
This is also squarely in the territory MAP works in with physician clients. When we manage a practice’s social presence, the structure is built around this distinction from the start: a professional page for the practice and the physician’s public-facing work, kept separate from anything personal. It is not just good marketing practice. As of this update, it is what CPSO is explicitly advising.
The Takeaway
If your practice’s social media currently runs through a personal account, or if you have been fielding patient connection requests without a clear policy for how to handle them, this is a good moment to tighten that up. A dedicated professional account, plus a simple internal rule for how staff and physicians respond to patient requests, covers most of what CPSO is asking for.