Exploring school nurses’ potential to strengthen young people’s resilience to misinformation by promoting critical health literacy in Norway
Source: PubMed Central Open Access, NCBI / U.S. National Library of Medicine
Abstract Young people are increasingly exposed to health misinformation, especially in social media. They often lack the skills necessary to think critically about misleading claims they encounter and decisions they make. The Informed Health Choices framework provides principles for critical health literacy. These can be taught using resources shown to have positive impact on student’s abilities to think critically about health claims and make informed decisions. We explored the potential for school nurses in Norway to use a tailored set of teaching resources to support young people’s resilience to health misinformation harm. We conducted this qualitative context analysis for the purpose of informing resource development. We identified key issues related to school nurses’ capability, opportunity, and motivation to teach a set of critical health literacy principles and their needs regarding resource design. We conducted interviews, a focus group discussion, and co-design workshop and applied framework analysis to synthesize findings. School nurses in Norway seem keenly aware of young people’s vulnerability to harms posed by misinformation and likely motivated to expand their teaching role to include teaching critical health literacy. However, critical health literacy knowledge varies among school nurses. Teaching opportunities are limited, largely due to many mandated tasks. Therefore, content needs to be clearly aligned with their nurses’ existing responsibilities and school
Abstract
Abstract Young people are increasingly exposed to health misinformation, especially in social media. They often lack the skills necessary to think critically about misleading claims they encounter and decisions they make. The Informed Health Choices framework provides principles for critical health literacy. These can be taught using resources shown to have positive impact on student’s abilities to think critically about health claims and make informed decisions. We explored the potential for school nurses in Norway to use a tailored set of teaching resources to support young people’s resilience to health misinformation harm. We conducted this qualitative context analysis for the purpose of informing resource development. We identified key issues related to school nurses’ capability, opportunity, and motivation to teach a set of critical health literacy principles and their needs regarding resource design. We conducted interviews, a focus group discussion, and co-design workshop and applied framework analysis to synthesize findings. School nurses in Norway seem keenly aware of young people’s vulnerability to harms posed by misinformation and likely motivated to expand their teaching role to include teaching critical health literacy. However, critical health literacy knowledge varies among school nurses. Teaching opportunities are limited, largely due to many mandated tasks. Therefore, content needs to be clearly aligned with their nurses’ existing responsibilities and school curricula, and resources should be designed to support school nurses with limited time and critical health literacy skills, adaptable to emerging topics, be engaging to students, and facilitate school collaboration.