Health Literacy, Equity, and Communication in the COVID-19 Era of Misinformation: Emergence of Health Information Professionals in Infodemic Management

The Intersection of Health Literacy and Public Health: A Machine Learning-Enhanced Bibliometric Investigation

In recent decades, health literacy has garnered increasing attention alongside a variety of public health topics. This study aims to explore trends in this area through a bibliometric analysis. A Random Forest Model was utilized to identify keywords and other metadata that predict average citations in the field. To supplement this machine learning analysis, we have also implemented a bibliometric review of the corpus. Our findings reveal significant positive coefficients for the keywords "COVID-19" and "Male", underscoring the influence of the pandemic and potential gender-related factors in the literature. On the other hand, the keyword "Female" showed a negative coefficient, hinting at possible disparities that warrant further investigation. Additionally, evolving themes such as COVID-19, mental health, and social media were discovered. A significant change was observed in the main publishing journals, while the major contributing authors remained the same. The results hint at the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and a significant association between gender-related keywords on citation likelihood, as well as changing publication strategies, despite the fact that the main researchers remain those who have been studying health literacy since its creation.

The Next Infodemic: Abortion Misinformation

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines an infodemic as the proliferation of false or misleading information that leads to confusion, mistrust in health authorities, and the rejection of public health recommendations. The devastating impacts of an infodemic on public health were felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are now on the precipice of another infodemic, this one regarding abortion. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization resulted in the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which had protected a woman's right to have an abortion for nearly 50 years. The reversal of Roe v. Wade has given way to an abortion infodemic that is being exacerbated by a confusing and rapidly changing legislative landscape, the proliferation of abortion disinformants on the web, lax efforts by social media companies to abate abortion misinformation, and proposed legislation that threatens to prohibit the distribution of evidence-based abortion information. The abortion infodemic threatens to worsen the detrimental effects of the Roe v. Wade reversal on maternal morbidity and mortality. It also comes with unique barriers to traditional abatement efforts. In this piece, we lay out these challenges and urgently call for a public health research agenda on the abortion infodemic to stimulate the development of evidence-based public health efforts to mitigate the impact of misinformation on the increased maternal morbidity and mortality that is expected to result from abortion restrictions, particularly among marginalized populations.

Insights Into the Relationships Between Health Communication and Doctor-patient Relationship: A Scientometric Analysis Based on CiteSpace and Validation of Questionnaires

In order to understand the research status of the relationship between health communication and doctor-patient relationship, and to explore a new path of the impact of health communication on doctor-patient relationship, this paper adopted qualitative methods to quantize the literature over the past 10 years in the Web of Science database and carried out Co-Authorship Analysis, Co-Citation Analysis and Co-Occurrence Analysis based on CiteSpace. In addition, according to the results of bibliometric research, self-designed questionnaires were used to verify the result. A convenience sampling survey was conducted through the online "Questionnaire Star" platform (https://www.wjx.cn) on May 8, 2022, and a total of 254 questionnaires were collected. Interviewees were asked to use social software to acquire health knowledge. Participants come from 21 provinces, 4 municipalities, and 4 autonomous regions across the country, which is geographically representative. The results show that uncertainty of social media information and the particularity of the epidemic make the research on health communication and doctor-patient relationship in social media become a new hot spot. Social media health information quality (source credibility and content trust perception), information asymmetry perception, doctor-patient communication, doctor-patient consistency, doctor-patient trust, doctor-patient relationship may be the key variables for constructing theoretical models.

Content and Clinical Validation of the Nursing Outcome "Health Literacy Behaviour": A Validation Protocol

Health literacy (HL) is a result of health promotion and education that has been included as a nursing intervention since 2013. It was proposed, as a nursing activity, to "determine health literacy status at initiation of contact with the patient through informal and/or formal assessments". Because of that, the outcome 'Health Literacy Behaviour' has been incorporated in the sixth edition of the Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC). It collects the patient's different HL levels and allows them to be identified and evaluated in a social and health context. Nursing outcomes are helpful and provide relevant information for the evaluation of nursing interventions.

OBJECTIVES

To validate the contents of the nursing outcome 'Health Literacy Behaviour (2015)' in order to use them in nursing care plans, and to evaluate their psychometric properties, application level, and effectiveness in nursing care to detect low health literacy patients.

METHODS

a methodological two-phased study: (1) an exploratory study and content validation by expert consensus, who will evaluate revised content of nursing outcomes; (2) methodological design by clinical validation.

CONCLUSION

The validation of this nursing outcome in NOC will enable the generation of a helpful tool that would facilitate nurses to set individualised and efficient care interventions and identify low health literacy populations.

Settings for the development of health literacy: A conceptual review

Advances in conceptualizing settings in health promotion include understanding settings as complex and interlinked systems with a core commitment to health and related outcomes such as health literacy. Traditional settings for the development of health literacy include health care environments and schools. There is a need to identify and conceptualize non-traditional and emerging settings of twenty-first-century everyday life. The aim of this conceptual review is to inform a conceptual model of a "non-traditional" setting for the development of health literacy. The model uses the example of the public library to propose four equity-focused antecedents required in a setting for the development of health literacy: the setting acknowledges the wider determinants of health, is open access, involves local communities in how it is run, and facilitates informed action for health. The review concludes that a settings approach to the development of health literacy can be conceptualized as part of a coordinated "supersetting approach," where multiple settings work in synergy with each other.