It is important for nurses to ensure that the society is well educated in matters concerning their health. Additionally, there is the need for them to take part in health promotion programs and educating the population regarding their wellbeing. As such, nurses are obliged to address the unique needs that each patient has with intentions of boosting their self-perception concerning health (Sørensen et al., 2012). The goal of health literacy is that all patients are supposed to act on all the provided information which is critical in ensuring that they come out with optimal outcomes.
There is, however, concerns regarding the information that patients usually make use of from online medical sources. The primary reasons that have been associated with online sources are in line with the experiences that I have had with my patients. In most instances, usually misdiagnose themselves and end up utilizing the wrong medication (Miller & Bell, 2012. As such, most of them have ended up with higher readmission cases or undesirable outcomes from medical side effects. Nurses can be helpful in making patients determine the credibility of the online medical resources. The most trustworthy and credible resources that available to patients are mainly nursing medical databases like PubMed and CINHAL. Patients can effectively make use of these resources because the medical information contained therein is accurate, written in an objective manner, adequately addresses clinical problems, and are also timely. Therefore, patients are better placed in evaluating the credibility of such sources which is beneficial to their health.
There is the need for making sure that nurses are better placed in assisting patients to improve and their health literacy concerning online sources of information. As such, nurses should educate their patients to use simple web pages with simple links, text items, and graphics. The links used are supposed to be clearly labeled. Secondly, patients should be advised to use basic HTML over PDF files since the former are easy to navigate (Sørensen et al., 2012). Thirdly, nurses should educate patients on how to acquire credible medical information from reliable sources like PubMed. Finally, nurses should train patients on how to navigate the internet quickly by encouraging patients to use sources with links and table of contents at the back of the main page.
References
Miller, L. M. S., & Bell, R. A. (2012). Online Health Information Seeking The Influence of Age, Information Trustworthiness, and Search Challenges. Journal of aging and health, 24(3), 525-541.
Sørensen, K., Van den Broucke, S., Fullam, J., Doyle, G., Pelikan, J., Slonska, Z., & Brand, H. (2012). Health literacy and public health: a systematic review and integration of definitions and models. BMC public health, 12(1), 1.
