Information Literacy

1 Information Literacy Assignment The internet provides various information, most of which is primarily people's opinions and ideas instead of valid facts. Therefore, nurses need to evaluate the information published on the internet because only some of the information made available on the internet is factual. In this paper, an evaluation of the American Nurses Association's website, nursingworld.org, has been carried out. The evaluation has been done based on three criteria categories of authority, purpose, privacy, and disclosure. The evaluation of all these three criteria categories has revealed that the American Nurses Association's website is credible.

2 Information Literacy Assignment Introduction The internet has proved to be an instrumental tool in any given profession. Individuals rely on the internet to be updated with the current knowledge. In most cases, professional nurses have continued to rely on it as a good source of information. Despite the internet’s various forms and types of information, only some of the information available is credible. The internet sometimes contains information that is primarily people's opinions and ideas instead of valid facts.

A good example of a nursing-related website is the American Nurses Association's domain, commonly known as nursingworld.org. The website serves the purpose of representing American registered nurses' interests. The American Nurses Association's website advocates for the rights of the nurses in their places of work and promotes high standards in the nursing practice. It significantly enables millions of registered nurses in the United States to perform their duties efficiently. That notwithstanding, the website also enables nurses to offer their expertise in developing American health policies and push for following the right procedures.

Furthermore, nursingworld.org also plays a significant role in promoting and supporting the creation of nursing as an important and trusted profession. Therefore, this paper evaluates the chosen website based on criteria categories of source authority, finding validity, coverage, and privacy and disclosure. Google.com is the search engine utilized in locating the chosen website.

Criteria Categories for Evaluating the Website Definitions Authority Authority sources can be utilized in evaluating the reliability of the information on the website. Authority reveals whether the person, institution, or agency responsible for a site has the

3 knowledge and qualification to do so. For instance, an unnamed practitioner or even a reporter may author medical content. In cases where the content features no writer, the source's authority is based on the publisher's or producer's reliability. Therefore, the site can be assumed to be the content creator.

Purpose The purpose of the information published on the website should be clear. Websites are developed to achieve various purposes, including informing, persuading, or stating an opinion.

The content published on the site should support the purpose of the site targeting a specific audience. The website needs to be organized and focused, and the outside links provided should support the purpose of the site.

Privacy and Disclosure Privacy and confidentiality are other important elements or criteria that can be used to evaluate the website. The principle of non-maleficence points to the great need to safeguard the privacy of sources that provide the data. Ideally, evaluating this criterion is of great importance, given that breaching this aspect will result in an infringement of privacy and the organization losing its dignity.

Evaluating the Chosen Website According to the Criteria Categories Authority The content provided by this website is very reliable. The American Nurses Association is a well-known premier organization that represents the interests of millions of American registered nurses. American Nurses Association’s website, nursingworld.org, does not fall short of supplying its users with details regarding where it obtains its information. Additionally, the website also provides firsthand information through videos based on various speeches. Names of

4 individuals and institutions that provide information published on the website, not to forget the date of publications, are all shown on the website. Apart from being easily accessible, the website also offers users guidelines on maneuvering through the internet. For example, the website’s users are normally warned of possible virus risks. The contents published on the American Nurses Association's website are in eye-friendly font, making it easy for users to read.

Purpose Since its establishment, the website has been helping in promoting the development of the nursing profession. The American Nurses Association's website features a dependable Education Resource Center that offers clear information and helps its users how best they can build their leadership skills as they continue to pursue their higher education. By utilizing the enormous amount of information published on the website, a nurse can explore various career opportunities and offer care to patients with the highest level of attention. The Education Resource Center provides information on education offerings as well as partnerships with other educational institutions that offer programs on health. The Education Resource Center has been instrumental in helping nurses across the United States in their advanced education decisionmaking.

Further, the ANA website has also been providing online programs to members that have registered with the organization at discounted prices. Nurses normally operate on tight schedules, and the pressure to balance their shifts with school timetables is sometimes unbearable. Thus, online programs have been of great help to such nurses. Nurses can also obtain information on how to relate with their colleagues and patients as well as how to carry out themselves at their places of work from the website. Additionally, the ANA website also features many healthrelated groups that work to educate nurses and facilitate change from traditional nursing

5 practices. As a result, the network has significantly facilitated and enhanced the exchange of knowledge among nurses.

Privacy and Disclosure Privacy and confidentiality issues make some of the things taken seriously by the organization. The ANA website features a code of ethics that supervises the amount of information that can be shared with the public. The website provides principles and guidance for its members to help them interact on social media. Conversely, the website provides information to various nursing groups on how they can retain their professional standards on various social platforms. Just to mention, the ANA website features a privacy setting that allows nurses to separate professional and personal information. The system has been designed to keep unauthorized persons away from accessing the private information given by nurses. Interestingly, the website’s privacy settings help nurses evade landing into problems as they browse through it.

The safety of the users of the website from hackers is also ensured by the security policies put in place.

Moreover, the continuing advances in technology, which include social media, telehealth, and computerized medical database, among other technologies, have increased the risk of intentional and unintentional confidential health information breaches. The American Nurses Association’s website defines the role of nurses in protecting confidentiality and privacy and how nurses can avoid a breach (American Nurses Association, 2015). The organization takes privacy and confidentiality seriously because it is essential to building trusting relationships between patients and healthcare providers (American Nurses Association, 2015). The organization advocates for laws and policies that aim to offer protection to individually identifiable health information.

6 Evaluating the Chosen Website in terms of Strengths and Weaknesses Based on the Criteria Based on the above evaluation of the website according to the chosen criteria categories of authority, purpose, privacy, and disclosure, the American Nurses Association's website is credible. Millions of nurses across the United States perceive the organization's website as a perfect place to ask questions, get answers, share nurse-specific knowledge, and network with other nurses. Ideally, Pearce et al. (2018) point out that the organization's website has been instrumental in helping nurses to build professional relationships. The website is a member-only site; thus, users are certain that the questions asked are responded to with the help of a nurse. The website helps promote high standards in nursing practice and significantly enables millions of registered nurses in the country to perform their duties efficiently. This can be pointed out as one of the website's strengths. Nurses can freely use the information obtained from the site as they are sure that such information is valid or reliable as it is from nursing professionals.

According to Erickson and Pappas (2020), nurses rely on research to help them enhance their ability to provide quality health care to patients. Generally, for many years, the nursing fraternity has been relying on research to help redefine health policies around them. Therefore, the American Nurses Association’s website establishes itself as a significant research tool for many nurses across the country due to the fact that it acts as a research toolkit and protects the nurses’ private information. Given the rapid changes experienced in knowledge delivery, science, and technology, nurses need to keep up with such developments. Lee et al. (2018) and American Nurses Association's website provide that opportunity. The only weakness of the website is the wide range of information or content published on the website, which may cause confusion to new members not used to such an enormous volume of data.

7 Importance of Evaluating Information Found on the Internet The internet provides a variety of information, most of which are primarily people’s opinions and ideas instead of valid facts. Nurses need to evaluate the information published on the internet because only some of the information made available on the internet is factual. The internet consists of a wide variety of users and people who continue to publish information on various fields in which they ideally are yet to gain expertise or experience. Similarly, some of the individuals who provide information on the internet are fraudsters who are constantly looking for people from whom they can steal. To this extent, nurses across the country should consider using the information or subscribing to online programs from credible sources only in the nursing profession.

Further, through the American Nurses Association's Speakers Bureau, nurses can identify and request the speakers they would like to have. After identifying and requesting the speaker, nurses can meet with the speaker in their next meeting or function (American Nurses Association, 2021). Furthermore, the American Nurses Association’s website also features various articles on work safety, which nurses can take advantage of to ensure that they remain safe from health-related risks in the workplace.

Conclusion In summary, the internet has become an important tool in the life of many professionals operating in different fields throughout the country. Nonetheless, nurses need to see to it that the information they obtain from the internet for their use is valid and right. Doing so will significantly help them minimize or avoid in totality unnecessary nursing errors or mistakes.

Furthermore, as far as professional nurses are concerned, the internet is an important tool that enables them to network and develop beneficial relationships with other nurses from various

8 levels. Therefore, such kinds of attributes have certified the internet as an important tool in the life of many nurses across the country.

In this paper, an evaluation of the American Nurses Association’s website, nursingworld.org, has been carried out. The evaluation has been done based on three criteria categories of authority, purpose, privacy, and disclosure. Authority reveals whether the person, institution, or agency responsible for a site has the knowledge and qualification to do so. With regard to purpose, the content published on the site should support the purpose of the site and target a specific audience. Lastly, the principle of non-maleficence points to the great need to safeguard the privacy of the sources that provide the data. Evaluation of all these three criteria categories has revealed that the American Nurses Association’s website is credible. The website’s strength lies in the content published on the platform by reliable authors, as well as its efforts to protect users' privacy.

9 References American Nurses Association (2015). Privacy and confidentiality. https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/nursing-excellence/official-positionstatements/id/privacy-and-confidentiality/ American Nurses Association (2021). ANA Speaker’s Bureau. https://www.nursingworld.org/news/media-resources/ana-speakers-bureau/ Erickson, J. I., & Pappas, S. (2020). The value of nursing research. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 50(5), 243-244.

Lee, H., Min, H., Oh, S. M., & Shim, K. (2018). Mobile technology in undergraduate nursing education: A systematic review. Healthcare Informatics Research, 24(2), 97-108.

Pearce, P. F., Morgan, S., Matthews, J. H., Martin, D. M., Ross, S. O., Rochin, E., & Welton, J. M. (2018). The value of nurse staffing: ANA principles redevelopment and direction for the future. Nursing Economics, 36(4), 169–176.