Health Misinformation Patient Education Pamphlet Assignment Health Misinformation Health misinformation is a widespread problem, with false or misleading information about both longstanding health concerns like cancer and emergent situations like the COVID-19 pandemic spreading across the internet at a rapid pace

Health Misinformation Patient Education Pamphlet Assignment

Health Misinformation

Health misinformation is a widespread problem, with false or misleading information about both longstanding health concerns like cancer and emergent situations like the COVID-19 pandemic spreading across the internet at a rapid pace. Sometimes questionable health information is obvious, but it can also be difficult to recognize and can potentially reach millions of people.

Correcting misinformation, even on the individual level can have a significant impact on the overall spread of misinformation.

Best Practices for Correction:

1. 1. Include a link to an expert organization
   2. Repeat the correction
   3. Offer an alternative explanation
   4. Use plain language

How to best support these practices:

• Make easily accessible high-quality information available
• Create norms of citing sources
• Reinforce norms of correcting others
• Create shareable graphics using best practices  and plain language

Why create patient education materials?

Patient education materials can help your teaching efforts in the following ways:

• Reinforce teaching and increase retention
• Improve understanding and decrease the spread of misinformation
• Help make teaching faster and easier
• Improve compliance
• Improve patient satisfaction
• Serve as a resource for families to use at home
• Provide consistency across the spectrum of care

Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to give you the opportunity for guided practice in the development of patient/client/family education materials. For this assignment you will choose a topic that is considered controversial.  This can include any health problems or diseases that are frequently associated with misinformation such as Vaccines, COVID-19, Influenza, Cancers, weight loss fads or gimmicks, and create an educational pamphlet teaching the patient reliable information about the topic. All work must be IN YOUR OWN WORDS.

The pamphlet must include:

• Description of the health problem
• What causes the health problem (how can a person get it)
• What symptoms/clinical manifestations to watch out for and how is it diagnosed
• Who is susceptible to the health problem (age, gender, race, or group of people most affected, risk factors)
• Potential treatments and medications, Effectiveness of the treatments
• Potential complications (what happens if you don’t treat it).
• Common misconceptions about the condition and resources patient can go to get accurate and reliable information about the condition.
  • Choose 1 common misconception and create a graphic correcting it with reliable information and sources. Insert graphic into the pamphlet.
• Appropriate pictures, photos, drawings, or illustrations
• Reference Page with at least three professional resources

The product of this project should be a well-developed pamphlet (ex. a tri-fold pamphlet) like you would pick up at a doctor’s office educating you about this condition, as well as one infographic correcting a common misconception about the problem.

Here are a few general guidelines to help your materials be more easily read and understood. Remember that you are not writing for your peers, but for an audience that often have little to no understanding of medical terms, no prior knowledge of the topic or completely inaccurate information on the topic.

Why is Plain Language important?

Poor reading ability is a big problem in our country today. In addition, even good readers may not be able to read and understand health-related materials. Plain Language is necessary because oftentimes patients and families:

• Read and understand at a middle-school level.
  • 50% of adults in the U.S. read at an 8-9th grade level.
  • 20% read at or below a 5th grade level.
  • 5% don’t read at all.
• Are overwhelmed and intimidated by what they need to learn.
• Do not understand medical terms and jargon

• Are hesitant to ask questions when they don’t understand.
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What is Plain Language?

Plain Language is a way to write and speak so that your target audience (patients and families) can easily understand you. It is writing and speaking clearly and concisely using everyday, common, conversational language.

Plain Language is:

• Using commonly known and understood words and terms
• Eliminating non-essential information

Plain Language is not:

• “Dumbing-down”
• Talking down to a person
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