Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment
The chosen website is https://www.mayoclinic.org/about-mayo-clinic
which represents one of the largest integrated nonprofit medical organizations across the world. The website provides effective and adequate online information about care to help more people and medical professionals acquire the right help. The website is robust with new research work on health and diseases including the emerging diagnosis and cure. Through such research work, the website is able to inspire hope in those who are in need. The history of the organization dates back about 150 years when Charlie Mayo and Wil brothers united to develop a team-based and integrated medicine oriented platform (Mayo Clinic, 2023). The platform has been ranked as the leading across the United States in terms of providing new knowledge and healthcare services. The organization is committed to coming up with best practices for improving community health and accelerating diversity and equality in healthcare (Comfere et al., 2022). Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment
The Mayo Clinic targets people of all ages especially those who can read and write. This is because their information is readily available on the website hence those people with the ability to read and write are the best placed to access the website. For instance, the care facilities for Mayo Clinic are found across 44 communities where they serve over 600000 patients annually. However, according to the website information, the biggest number of visitors includes females at 57.56% and males at 22.44% with most visitors being persons between 25-34 years (Mayo Clinic, 2023). Additionally, the websites target clinicians and internal medicine physicians who want to advance their skills and knowledge on specific health concerns (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023).
The website is highly readable with ideal sentences, words, and syllables. The analysis of its readability as conducted by the SMOG formula is vital in highlighting the website’s ease of reading by the target population (Worrall et al., 2020). The SMOG formula involves several steps with the initial one being to count 10 consecutive sentences at the start, middle, and towards the end of the materials accumulating a total of 30 sentences. The next step is to count words or syllables in these 30 sentences. Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment The third step is to add the number of words counted and use the SMOG conversion table in grading. The SMOG formula gives the exact number of years of education that visitors to the website need to effectively understand their text. The SMOG results for Mayo Clinic are 6.3 meaning their minimum reading age is 11 years and above (Brangan, 2015).
The website is highly useful to the target population and also to the population identified through the SMOG test. This is because, the website offers materials that are written in the simplest language possible and which are able to attract readers with lower education (Mayo Clinic, 2023). This helps the organization in achieving its mandate of serving as many people as possible and giving many others free access to healthcare information. Also, the website is crucial in supporting clinicians and physicians with newly acquired evidence-based since it has well-researched and informative studies about almost every disease, diagnostic, preventive, and treatment model. The nature of the website in offering free services attracts most of the readers who are able to follow these materials and evaluate different diseases (Worrall et al., 2020). The website visitors who are not clinicians are also able to benefit from the website since they are able to identify different diseases they experience or those of their families and evaluate their adverse levels and the time to visit a doctor. Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment
Additionally, Mayo Clinic attracts most of the target population through its strong brand recognition for instance, the use of its well-recognizable logo, images, and photos helps in attracting target clients. The materials are also accessible through social media sites making it a platform for millions of users across the globe. The information is highly useful to the target population since the information is content-based and informative about almost every health issue. The availability of value-added content is a way the Mayo Clinic attracts an audience since most want to add more knowledge about their areas of interest (Worrall et al., 2020). The website also adheres to ethical standards and only relevant ads are brought and they do not distract readers.
Health literacy is the ability to acquire, process, and also to understand selected health materials and services for better decisions. The Mayo Clinic website is a leading platform for providing literacy health education. The website is powered by expert editors and journalists, health educators, and creative writers among others. The content on the website is developed by professionals including scientists, medical experts, and physicians. For instance, data shows that only 12% of adults in the United States were proficient in health literacy whereas over one-third that is about 77 million people had difficulty in evaluating simple health tasks like child immunizations and following simple prescriptions. Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment Further, lack of sufficient health literacy impacts the adults across all races with whites having a better basic health literacy at 28% while Hispanics have a below average health literacy with 65% of adults (Caine et al., 2022).
Across the Mayo Clinic website, there are huge pools of educational materials offering health literacy. They include pamphlets, blogs, research articles, and DVDs. The website has a collection of about 3000 pieces of effectively developed materials for health education (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023). These materials assist the patients to have a better understanding of medical tests, disease and conditions, surgical procedures, self-care, wellness, and preventive health. The educational materials are developed with consideration for patients with special needs and offer in-depth health information. The most important part of the literacy materials from the Mayo clinic website is that they are evidence-based materials that offer both theories and principles of health practices. They also have animations and perfect medical illustrations that add value to the contents making practice easier for the common man (Harmon et al., 2021). Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment
Importantly, the website provides material in as many languages as possible which makes it possible for global readers to readily identify their preferred materials. The adequately developed material is created through a superb methodology that helps the clients to have comprehension and a high retention rate of the contents (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023). The materials and the website can be accessed from anywhere across the globe and users can use their preferred digital systems including smartphones, computers, iPhones, and other devices. Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment
References
Brangan, Sanja. (2015). Development of SMOG-Cro readability formula for healthcare communication and patient education. Collegium antropologicum. 39. 11-20.
Caine, N. A., Ebbert, J. O., Raffals, L. E., Philpot, L. M., Sundsted, K. K., Mikhail, A. E., Issa, M., Schletty, A. A., & Shah, V. H. (2022). A 2030 Vision for the Mayo Clinic Department of Medicine. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 97(7), 1232–1236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2022.02.010
Comfere, N. I., Matulis, J. C., 3rd, & O’Horo, J. C. (2020). Quality improvement and healthcare: The Mayo Clinic Quality Academy experience. Journal of clinical tuberculosis and other mycobacterial diseases, 20, 100170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jctube.2020.100170
Fitzpatrick P. J. (2023). Improving health literacy using the power of digital communications to achieve better health outcomes for patients and practitioners. Frontiers in digital health, 5, 1264780. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2023.1264780
Harmon, D. M., Young, C. D., Bear, M. A., Aase, L. A., & Pruthi, S. (2021). Integrating online community support into outpatient breast cancer care: Mayo Clinic Connect online platform. Digital health, 7, 20552076211048979. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076211048979
Mayo Clinic. (2023). Solving the world’s toughest medical problems. https://www.mayoclinic.org/about-mayo-clinic
Worrall, A.P., Connolly, M.J., O’Neill, A. (2020). Readability of online COVID-19 health information: a comparison between four English speaking countries. BMC Public Health 20, 1635 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09710-5
Select a health education website and describe it – Provide URL. Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment
Analyze the readability of the website using 1 of 3 techniques: SAM analysis, SMOG formula, or Fry formula.
Write a paper with at least 1,000 words and include:
The chosen website, the target population, readability results, and an analysis of the results: Would this website be useful to the population it is designed for? Why or why not? Provide a detailed discussion.
Do a literature review and provide some information on health literacy (e.g., statistics, definition of concepts, national programs, etc.)
Length: Word Count of at least 1000 words. Make sure to include a word count before the Reference list.
References: At least five references in APA are required for this assignment. Analysis of Health Literacy Materials Assignment