Health Literacy of Patients - An Essay Example

Literacy in the field of health is fathomed as a factor of increasing patient outcomes as well as playing a significant role in ensuring that patients are updated on matters regarding their general health status (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015). Where the people are literate, the patients are most likely capable of conducting a pre-research on their diagnostic symptoms prior to seeking pieces of advice from the health experts. As a result, nurses and other healthcare practitioners are responsible for teaching the appropriate techniques and skills of identifying the most suitable and credible websites to generate health information. Additionally, these health nurses have to educate the patients on how to interpret or translate the health information acquired from these websites. With the increment of literacy level among the people and the patients, in particular, the patient's access to the electronic health records has also increased. Therefore, the nurses as well ought to assist the patients with the needful online health education instruments which ensure literacy development and advancement for less privileged patients (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015).

In the ER, the patients normally come with their already diagnosed results based on the symptoms derived from the healthcare-based websites. However, this approach may result in frustrations on patient's and staff's expectation, particularly in situations where pre-diagnose comes out opposite of their predetermined anticipations. Anxiety, depression, and worry fill these people.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has provided significantly important tips on how to search for reliable and suitable online health information from their website. According to their directory guidance, the Johns Hopkins Medicine has advised the use of specific websites like MedlinePlus.gov or any other genuinely accepted government health websites. This will save the time wasted when looking for information from the general internet google search. In addition, commercial healthcare websites are preferred to ensure credibility and bias of the information (Johns Hopkins Medicine, n.d.).

In the long-run, the nursing professionals are responsible for ensuring that the electronic healthcare diagnostic approach is accessible to everyone. However, they ought to consider the technological accessibility of the patients, their willingness to learn, their education and cultural backgrounds before administering the health-related teaching (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2015). Conclusively, there is more than enough health-related information online that patients and nurses ought to exhaustively make use of, therefore, this information ought to be derived and applied appropriately.

References

Johns Hopkins Medicine. (n.d.). Finding reliable health information online. Retrieved from http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/johns_hopkins_bayview/patient_visitor_amenities/community_health_library/index.html

McGonigle, D., & Mastrian, K. G. (2015). Nursing informatics and the foundation of knowledge (3rd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.