A community education initiative to improve using online health information: participation and impact

The Internet has become a major source of health information for the general public and has the potential to influence health behaviours; however, most people lack the knowledge and skills to use it insightfully. This paper reports on the evaluation of a community education program, in which a team of clinicians and consumer representatives from a large metropolitan hospital partnered with a major public library to provide free interactive workshops for the general public. The aim of the workshops was to improve participants' ability to find and use evidence-based health information on the Internet. The aim of the evaluation reported here was to study participation in and impact of these workshops. Researchers administered pre- and post-workshop surveys to 89 members of the general public who participated in a workshop. This study found not only similarities in participants' pre-workshop use of online health information compared with population-level studies but also some interesting differences. The workshop was found to have an overall positive impact on changing the way participants intended to look for and use health information in the future, and on improving their knowledge about evidence-based health information, with 63.5% of respondents stating that they would use health information in the future to ask a doctor new questions. These findings offer important evidence of the need to plan nuanced health literacy education and information strategies for the general public.