Access to Health Care Information
WEEK 4 DISCUSSIONS
Access to Health Care Information
The wide-reaching span of today's global society is increasingly being seen in the breadth of heath care information on the Internet. Today's patients are more informed than ever and can easily find information on anything from diseases to treatments. Reflect on how this ease of information impacts health care both globally and locally, and then address the following:
• Share an example of a time when a client or patient asked questions about your nursing care or the medical plan of care based on that person's use of non-valid Internet health information Web sites.
• Explain how you managed the situation and your thoughts on how nurses might address patient or client use of such information sites.
• Share your thoughts on the existence and impact of the digital divide in relation to your nursing-practice experiences. Provide one example to illustrate your thoughts.
Support your ideas or those of others with references from the professional nursing literature.
Post your response by Day 3 of this week.
Health Care Information
Name:
Institution:
The world is experiencing constant change every day and this affects the perceptions, information and the productivity associated with different fields. As new information comes to light, the old practices are redefined to match the new standards and outputs expected (Webmd.com, 2014). The communication sphere is one of the fields that are greatly affected by the generation of new information on a daily basis. Gone are the days that most of the information was shared through the print media (Killeen & King, 2007). New information would take a much longer to get to the target audience and the outreach was constricted in magnitude. In this age of information and technology prowess, new information travels fast through the internet. The World Wide Web has made it easier to get information at the click of a button. However, not all the information that is uploaded on the internet is genuine (Syed-Abdul et al., 2013). The health care sector and in particular nursing care, is one of the sectors that has been marred by misleading informatics. There are websites running misleading information to the audience and this has in turn led to health complications.
In my second year as a nurse, there was a teenage patient that was brought in by her mother at the hospital (Webmd.com, 2014). According to patient, she had been experiencing dizziness most of the time. This feeling had been ongoing for the last few months, but it had not been worse than the day earlier, when she fainted in her sociology class. The mother also noted that the daughter had been complaining of weakness and was tired most of the time. Prior to this, the patient had been admitted for three days, after experiencing complications with her bowel movement. According to the mother, the daughter had been taking laxatives to relieve her bowel movement complication. Later, the patient also indicated that she had been feeling quite depressed. Her mother also affirmed the same, but added that she thought it may be normal as she assumed her daughter being an adolescent would experience hormonal imbalance and thus frequent depression (Killeen & King, 2007). Previous medical care had not yielded any positive result and as such, the mother sought to try a different hospital which led to her coming to the hospital I was working at. After diagnostic tests by one of the doctors in session, the patient was found to have been suffering from anemia. Further diagnosis, revealed that the patient was suffering from anorexia nervosa.
According to the patient, she did not want ...