A plan to detect fake news about health

Noelia Navas completed the Nursing Degree offered by the University of La Rioja between 2015 and 2019. Upon completion, this researcher decided to extend her academic training, first with a master’s degree in Zaragoza and later, again in Logroño, with the preparation of a doctoral thesis – in which she is now immersed – directed by professors Raúl Juárez and Pedro Satrústegui. Her focus is on the information offered by the media about health and how it can influence future professionals in that field. Thus, she began to analyze health news – especially from digital media – and check the quality of this published information.

Simultaneously, and as a complement to this thesis, Noelia Navas has been developing during the course that is now ending a teaching innovation project called: “DISLIKE: Media Literacy Program in Health.”

The programme has been developed throughout the course with second-year Nursing Degree students at the University of La Rioja. It aims to give them the necessary knowledge to be able to analyse what the media says about health issues.

“Ultimately, it is about teaching them to discern and identify information disorders: criteria, purpose, etc., that digital media incur in,” says Navas, speaking of a program whose content is evolving within this doctoral thesis that has not yet been defended.

Disinformation

The future doctor in Nursing acknowledges that there is currently “a lot of misinformation” in the media because they incur, she says, in “too many information disorders.” In short, “there is a lack of knowledge that leads to misinformation in society.” This situation is aggravated by what is published through social networks “which bombard us with information that is not always reliable.”

The DISLIKE programme envisages that after having provided future nursing professionals with knowledge and a critical spirit, “the knowledge they acquire in a practical and theoretical way will be transferred to society through the social network Instagram (profile: @dislike_ur), as future professionals and health disseminators”. The idea is to minimise and counteract the negative impact that bad or erroneous published information may have both on society and on the health professionals themselves.