Introduction
The website of my choice is www.druginfo.nlm.nih.gov. This is a website that contains information on drugs and medicine that is used by health professionals in their work and research. The purpose of the website is to provide users with the information of specific drugs which is contained in the drug information portal as shown in the US National Library of Medicine and other agencies. It also acts as a link between medics’ prescription plans. Furthermore, it acts as a source of information to people who buy drugs online. The website is also associated with providing clinical trials to the medics in hospitals. It is worth noting that the website is also used as a method of advertising certain drugs together with their labels. The search engine that has been used to locate and search the website is google. The website has been found as a government website and is used to provide information to the citizens who are both patients and nurses. The rationale for selecting the website has been on account of which website has been on its reliability and its overall outlook.
Analysis of the website
The website is authoritative since it is a governmental organization. It is reliable due to its low level of non-official information and useless adverts.
It is also objective since the information provided by the government is not biased in terms of the content that it contains. The website provides useful information that can be used by the healthcare professionals in their duties. They can be able to read and understand the prescription of drugs. The website also shows the effects that these drugs may have upon taking them. Therefore, the information that the government has posted is reliable and can be relied upon by any health professional.
The website does not guarantee any endorsement of an external link as a recommendation with respect to the services that they provide. It is explicitly liable for the information that they give in their website.
It is also easy to navigate throughout the website. This is an indication that the interaction between humans and the computer is highly efficient. The user can be able to move from one page to the other while searching for a particular dosage or prescription. The links are properly arranged based on the various specialties that the nurses may want to administer. This includes buying of medicine, clinical trials and tests as well as advertising.
The privacy of the personnel is taken care of. Information shared on this website is highly confidential. In the nursing profession, personal data and medication is treated as confidential.
The website is credible and can be relied upon. One of the reasons is that it can provide the user with details of drugs and how to use them. The site provides the user with a system of checking for medication errors. This has been very useful because there may be cases of wrong doses.
There is also a huge presence of quality teaching on the proper use of drugs. Therefore, the site can be selected to guide health professionals in their work. It also outlines the safety of using the drugs in question. The evidence of credibility of the website is also imminent since it is a collective establishment of a national approach in giving guidance on the use of medicine. This has been explained by Miller, L., Graves, R., Jones, B., & Sievert, M. (2010).
It is important for a health professional to evaluate information found on any website because sometimes the information may not be very accurate. Therefore, the prescription may differ based on the understanding of the health professional. The condition can be worse especially when the information can be used to provide medication to a patient. The correctness of the information should also be justified before applying it.
The information on a website may also be outdated. The facts on the website may not be well documented or well researched about. This is a blow to both the nurse professional and the patient who is at risk of being administered. A nurse can use the information in order to assess the level of safety by cross-checking with peers in the health sector. Nurses can also use the information to look for diseases and vaccines.
Conclusion
With the increased usage and availability of information on the World Wide Web, nursing professionals need to be very careful while evaluating what information to use from a website. The information that they find needs to be evidence-based and be supported with facts. Most of the information is found on goggle but its credibility and reliability is questionable. Some of it is based on facts which have not been thoroughly researched on and tested.
It is also important for nurses and other professionals to disregard any information that is not found on reliable websites. The websites that are deemed to be reliable are those that are formed by either organizations or the governments.
References
K, L., V, S., D, A., & K, M. (2012). Increasing nurses’ access to evidence through a web-based resource. Journal of Nursing Administration, 11. Web.
Miller, L., Graves, R., Jones, B., & Sievert, M. (2010). International journal of nursing education.Beyond Google: Finding and Evaluating Web-Based Information for Community-Based Nursing Practice, 31. Web.
Miller, L., Graves, B., Jones, B., & Sievert, M. (2010). Merging silos: Collaborating for information literacy. Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 41(6), 267-272. Web.