The healthcare industry continues to be one of the most progressive, adaptive, innovative, and transcendent industries globally. The industry transcends limitations and explores new frontiers in every aspect of its existence. However, despite its modernization and tremendous growth, the healthcare industry faces several limitations and barriers that undermine its place in the modern world and threaten its future impacts on human society. Growing trends in globalization and the increased integration of the internet into societal lives create an avenue for exposure to different information, thus creating and increasing mistrust towards the healthcare industry, which is quickly becoming a viable threat the industry has to address if it is to continue growing and help in preserving human life.
The Problem of Mistrust and Misinformation in the Healthcare Industry.
Whenever faced with a significant healthcare crisis, industry stakeholders must contend with misinformation, leading to mistrust. The Covid-19 and the HIV/AIDS pandemics show the power of misinformation during global health phenomenon. According to Jaiswalet al. (2020), during the onset of novel diseases, stakeholders must rely on inadequate, inconsistent, and largely non-evidence-based responses when preparing a response. The situation facilitates the prevalence of misinformation due to the reliance of the public on far reach of social media “armchair experts”, who often sensationalize the issue and create tremendous uncertainty, fear, and anger concerning the origins, treatments, and prevention methods regarding the disease (Jaiswal et al., 2020). Social media discussion forums and platforms give sensationalized and increasing information a global platform to influence billions of people. The dangers of misinformation are evident when one considers the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people developed a dismissive attitude toward the disease and its fatality rate (Jaiswal et al., 2020). The was also an increased mistrust towards every government measure to contain the pandemic, with exceptional disregard and outright suspicion toward the vaccine, its safety, and effectiveness.
According to Xiang & Lehmann (2021), misinformation in healthcare is detrimental to the well-being and health of billions of persons and is an emerging threat to public health. Stakeholders in the healthcare industry face unprecedented challenges when addressing the issue in modern times due to the widespread adoption of the internet. During the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, research showed that about 42% of US adults and 52% of non-white adults would refuse a vaccine (Xiang & Lehmann, 2021). Vaccine hesitancy and outright rejection by significant portions of the American population might be credited to misinformation and a general mistrust toward the healthcare industry. (Xiang and Lehmann, 2021) state that confidence in the importance of vaccines strongly influences vaccine uptake, and therefore, receiving sound medical information is also a significant factor. The research provided, and the general feeling one got from living through the COVID-19 panCOVID-19 becomes apparent that misinformation and mistrust from the public toward the healthcare industry is a significant problem that places numerous lives at risk (Xiang & Lehmann, 2021). Therefore, healthcare stakeholders must find ways of dealing with misinformation within the industry, as it potentially places numerous lives at risk.
Proposed Solution in Addressing the Issue.
The evidence from multiple scholars and our collective lived-experienced experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic shows the viability of misinformation as an emerging threat that discredits the healthcare industry. Resolving the issue of misinformation and mistrust in the healthcare industry is likely to persist as an insurmountable hurdle in healthcare, creating mistrust and dismissal of crucial medical advice. Stakeholders in the healthcare industry, especially those in the training and preparing sectors of the industry, must find ways of combating this modern phenomenon. There are several interventions suggested by several scholars to address the issue effectively. For instance, there are suggestions to develop legal policies limiting medical discourse and opinion to trained professionals, promoting awareness campaigns, increasing the frequency of healthcare-related content on various platforms, and increasing the presence of medical professionals in the digital space (Bautista et al., 2021). Like many of the suggested interventions, these interventions rely on the promotion of sound information and medical advice from credible sources. However, the strategies lack the personal appeal that misinformation often thrives on, as the claims are usually from relatable sources. To combat the issue of misinformation, healthcare steeper must change their tactics.
A viable approach is to increase attention to the educational element in healthcare. At their core, all medicine,e premedical, and those closely associated with the industry are educational. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other professionals often must educate their patients on numerous subjects. The stakeholders need to educate their patients and clients on proper dosages, medical applications, and applications and ents, among other vital concepts, as part of their primary function as stakeholders in the field. Therefore, stakeholders must develop proper educational skills to create an effective remedy to misinformation in the medical industry. Such skills will promote their ability to disseminate information to the patients and clients in practical ways that can combat misinformation from the internet. Therefore, the proposed solution is to review the educational aspect of the healthcare industry and introduce measures to promote the teaching skills of all professionals and elevate them as effective educators. The intervention will require the proper training of professionals and other stakeholders to become better educators to the masses and thus help them shape opinions and combat misinformation.
In conclusion, misinformation and its ability to foster mistrust in the healthcare industry is a viable problem that gets overlooked. The problem makes it difficult for healthcare stakeholders to effectively coordinate when addressing critical healthcare issues, especially in the modern age of widespread infection. Utilizing intervention that appeals to the educative nature of healthcare workers can help mitigate the problem. Stakeholders should restructure the industry to promote the proper training of healthcare professionals to effectively transform them into good educators to help combat the issue. The stakeholders can help create and secure public confidence in the healthcare industry with proper educational skills.
References.
Bautista, J. R., Zhang, Y., & Gwizdka, J. (2021). Healthcare professionals’ acts of correcting health misinformation on social media. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 148, 104375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2021.104375
Jaiswal, J., LoSchiavo, C., & Perlman, D. C. (2020). Disinformation, misinformation and inequality-driven mistrust in the time of COVID-19: lessons unlearned from AIDS denialism. AIDS and Behavior, 24, 2776-2780.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10461-020-02925-y
Xiang, D., & Lehmann, L. S. (2021). Confronting the misinformation pandemic. Health Policy and Technology, 10(3), 100520. https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.hlpt.2021.100520
write