Subject Guides: Practical Nursing: Library Research

Information Literacy

Information literacy is defined by the Association of College and Research Libraries as "the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning."

Why is Information Literacy Important?

•Acquiring skills to translate information into knowledge is relevant to all disciplines.

•Better research skills can produce more effectively-argued research papers.

•Information literacy empowers students to learn for themselves and make informed decisions.

•Students are new to scholarship and the academy, and their mental models can be different from those of faculty.

•Information literacy gives students strategies to look for bias and assess context when evaluating information.

•Information literacy is linked to professional competency and gives graduates skills that are relevant to their work and personal lives.

(Dalhousie University Libraries. (n.d.). What is information literacy and how can I incorporate it into my classroom? https://libraries.dal.ca/services/faculty-services/infolit.html)

Standards from Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)

The information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.
The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.
The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.
The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.

Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). (2015). Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards

Seven Habits and Skills

This program presents seven habits and skills for improving one's information literacy. It discusses finding your information needs, developing search strategies, evaluating sources, analyzing information, considering information, using information ethically, and practicing.

Evaluating Information Sources

This program examines ways to know if a source is credible by looking at authorship and expertise, the publisher or platform, objectivity and bias, citations and references, and timeliness and currency of the information.

Effective Search Strategies

Discussing how Boolean operators work, this program teaches search techniques for refining online searches. It also considers phrase, date range, file type, language, site-specific, numeric range, related terms, and advanced image searches

Media Literacy

How do you know if something is fake news? This program emphasizes the value of developing your critical thinking skills. It looks at source evaluation, media bias, political bias, ideological bias, corporate bias, sensationalism, and confirmation bias.

Ethical Use of Information

Emphasizing the importance of using information in a way that is fair, honest, and shows respect for others, this program discusses aspects of copyright, plagiarism (including self-plagiarism), fair use, and privacy of information.

Media Literacy: A Summary

This program emphasizes that information literacy is not just about knowing where to find information; it's about knowing how to evaluate, analyze and use that information effectively, and responsibly. It reviews the importance of critical thinking and building one's media literacy skills.

Health Literacy

Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.

It includes knowing how to describe symptoms, where to find help for health issues, how to understand medical information and how to safely manage the use of medication

Increasing health literacy is essential to empowering people to manage their health and advocate for their family’s and their own well being, as well as reducing the burden on Canada’s health care system.

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2020), What is health literacy? https://www.cdc.gov/healthliteracy/learn/index.html

ABC Life Literacy Canada. (2022) Health literacy. https://abclifeliteracy.ca/health-literacy/)

Health Literacy is dependent on person and system factors such as:

Knowledge of health topics
Culture
Mother language
Age
Literacy and Numeracy
Communication skills of health-care providers

(Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO). (n.d.). Nursing best practice guidelines: Principles of health literacy. https://bpgmobile.rnao.ca/node/1292)

Health literacy is connected to health equity (attaining the highest level of health for all people).We will achieve health equity when everyone has the opportunity to be as healthy as possible. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2020), What is health literacy? https://www.cdc.gov/healthliteracy/learn/index.html)

People with low health literacy are less likely to:

Be able to identify their own medications
Understand how to take their medications
Understand the potential side effects
People with low health literacy are more likely to misunderstand warning labels
(ABC Life Literacy Canada. (2022) Health literacy. https://abclifeliteracy.ca/health-literacy/)

Health Literacy in Canada

23% of Canadians find it “fairly difficult” or “very difficult” to find out where to get professional help when they are ill
54% find it “fairly difficult” or “very difficult” to judge when to seek a second opinion from another doctor
60% of adults in Canada are unable to obtain, understand and act upon health information and services and to make appropriate health decisions on their own.
Seniors, immigrants and unemployed people have, on average, lower levels of health literacy skills

Research estimates that providing chronic patients with education on self-management combined with ongoing supervision by a case manager could create savings of over $2,000 per patient per year
There are more adults with low health literacy (60%) than there are with low levels of prose literacy (48% – defined as the ability to understand and use information from texts). These numbers suggest that the two literacies are different.
Health literacy tasks usually involve a combination of prose literacy, document literacy and numeracy skills

(ABC Life Literacy Canada. (2022) Health literacy. https://abclifeliteracy.ca/health-literacy/)

The Challenge of Healthcare Literacy

This program provides healthcare personnel clear techniques to utilize when facing a population with low healthcare literacy and teaches actions to take to help all patients make informed healthcare choices. It looks at the prevalence of low healthcare literacy and identifies some of its causes, examines patient behaviors that help to identify those with low healthcare literacy, and examines the components of an informed consent, offering techniques for assisting patients to make informed healthcare choices.

Behavior Indicating Problems with Health Literacy

Red flags include lack of clarity about medications, difficulty explaining medical problems, does not ask questions, seeking help late, expressing anger or walking out, difficulty comprehending written materials, incomplete forms, miss appointments, skipped tests, and non-compliance with medications. Educate healthcare providers, insist on a teach-back, assess cognitive levels, use simple language, and speak slowly. Encourage a patient to ask about their diagnosis, treatment, and why it is important.

Health Literacy
From ABC Life Literacy Canada, this page defines health literacy and looks at literacy in Canada
Battling the (mis)infodemic: A look at health literacy in Canada
From Nova Scotia Health Library Services.

Additional Resources

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Call Number: RA 418.5 T73 F33 2012
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest. ______ Lia Lee 1982-2012 Lia Lee died on August 31, 2012. She was thirty years old and had been in a vegetative state since the age of four. Until the day of her death, her family cared for her lovingly at home.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Call Number: RC 265.6 L24 S55 2011
The story of modern medicine and bioethics--and, indeed, race relations--is refracted beautifully, and movingly. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down,The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Boasting an exceptional cast and production team, and based on Rebecca Skloot’s critically acclaimed 2010 nonfiction best-seller of the same name, this HBO Films drama tells the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African- American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line, known as HeLa. Told primarily through the eyes of Lacks’ daughter Deborah (Oprah Winfrey) and journalist Rebecca Skloot (Rose Byrne), the film chronicles Deborah’s search to learn about the mother she never knew, and to understand how the unauthorized harvesting of Lacks’ cancerous cells in 1951 led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs, from cancer to polio to radiation to AIDS, changing countless lives and the face of medicine forever. With a supporting cast that includes Renée Elise Goldsberry, Reg E. Cathey, Courtney B. Vance, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Leslie Uggams, Reed Birney, Rocky Carroll and John Douglas Thompson, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a story of medical arrogance and triumph, race, poverty, and deep friendship between the unlikeliest of people.

The Health Care Professional's Guide to Cultural Competence by Rani Hajela Srivastava
Call Number: RT 86.54 H43 2023
Publication Date: 2022
AVAILABLE at NSCC Ivany, NSCC Sydney, and NSCC Truro

Build the skills you need to understand and care for a wide diversity of patients! The Health Care Professional's Guide to Cultural Competence, 2nd Edition provides a guide to safe and effective cross-cultural care. Applying theory to practice, the book begins with an overview of clinical cultural competence. This guide shows how to apply cultural competence across diverse populations, and then discusses considerations in working with specific populations. Using this approach, you will develop a set of behaviours, attitudes, and policies that help you work effectively in many settings. From an expert team of authors led by Rani H. Srivastava, this guide will enhance your care of Indigenous, LGBTQ2, racialized persons, and immigrant and refugee populations. UNIQUE approach looks at populations the way health care workers encounter them, not by ethno-cultural/religious labels. Accessible writing style relays information in a balanced and concise manner for undergraduate and graduate students as well as health care professionals. Multidisciplinary perspective is provided by authors who represent a variety of health disciplines and cultural identities, who may be educators or practitioners, each presenting complex ideas in understandable ways and controversial ideas in a transparent way. Cultural Considerations in Care and Cultural Competence in Action boxes integrate theory into practice and invite critical self-reflection. Teaching and learning tools include learning objectives and key terms at the beginning of each chapter, plus end-of-chapter group activities, review questions, and more. NEW! New chapters on Indigenous health, sexual and gender diversity, immigrant and refugee health, and community health are added to this edition, and new topics include cultural safety, cultural humility, the impacts of racism, working with interpreters and the use of technology, palliative care, and more. NEW! UNIQUE! Cultural competence and safety perspectives throughout the text help you to be more responsive in delivering culturally safe care, and in reaching the goal of equity and culturally competent care. NEW! Discussion of cultural issues addresses power, privilege, intersectionality, equity, advocacy, and being an ally. NEW! Up-to-date content includes the latest statistics, guidelines, research, references, and resources. NEW! Evolve website enhances your understanding with review questions, unfolding case studies, and more.
An Introduction to Indigenous Health and Healthcare in Canada
Publication Date: 2022
This text describes what is distinctive about Indigenous approaches to health and healing and why it should be studied as a discrete field. It provides a framework for professionals to approach Indigenous clients in a way that both respects the client's worldview while retaining a professional epistemology. Grounded in the concepts of cultural sensitivity, competency, and safety--yet filled with practical information--this book integrates historical, social, and clinical approaches illuminated by concrete examples from the field and relevant case studies.
Transforming racial and cultural lines in health and social care : listening, loving, and lifting spirits when you can
ISBN: Transforming racial and cultural lines in health and social care : listening, loving, and lifting spirits when you can
Publication Date: 2020
This book proposes an innovative new model for transforming racial and cultural lines in health and social care through communication processes, and introduces listening partnerships as a cost-effective, sustainable intervention to improve communication skills. Transforming Racial and Cultural Lines in Health and Social Care walks the reader through the process of developing the essential skills for racially and culturally effective and compassionate communication.
Communicating Across Cultures
Publication Date: 2018
This highly regarded text--now revised and expanded with 50% new material--helps students and professionals build their knowledge and competencies for effective intercultural communication in any setting. The authors' comprehensive, updated theoretical framework (integrative identity negotiation theory) reveals how both verbal and nonverbal communication are affected by multilayered facets of identity. Written in a candid, conversational style, the book is rich with engaging examples illustrating cultural conflicts and misunderstandings that arise in workplace, educational, interpersonal, and community contexts. Readers learn how to transform polarized conversations into successful intercultural engagements by combining knowledge about culture with mindful listening and communication skills.
Introduction to Determinants of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples' Health in Canada
Publication Date: 2022
This critical new volume to the field of health studies offers an introductory overview of the determinants of health for Indigenous Peoples in Canada, while cultivating an understanding of the presence of coloniality in health care and how it determines First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples' health and well-being. The text is broken down into the What, Where, Who, and How, and each part contains a comprehensive and holistic approach to understanding the many factors, historical and contemporary, that are significant in shaping the life and health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and beyond.