Abstract
It has been an article of faith for so long that child health nurses have a key role to play as ‘parent and health educators’ (Baxter and Gorman, 1997). Trading on nurses’ enviable position as one of, if not the most trusted profession in poll after poll, it has been thought that parents and families would be hanging on our every word of wisdom in relation to their child’s health. If nurse didn’t know the exact advice to give, don’t worry, there would always be a pamphlet available on that rack on the wall of the clinic or GP surgery.
In 2019 it all sounds like something dug up in a time capsule.
We are now in an infamously ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ (Chiou and Tucker, 2018) era where concepts such as ‘qualifications’, ‘expertise’, ‘research’, ‘science’ or ‘facts’ are little more than grist to the burgeoning conspiracy theory mill. Why should any parent listen to a nurse or any other health professional since they are simply elitist stooges of ‘big-pharma’ or the medical establishment who want to damage and harm their children by pumping them full of poisonous cocktails of dangerous drugs, chemicals, ‘Frankenstein food’ and, heaven forbid, even vaccines, so the story goes. I wish that this could be read as some deranged parody, but nobody is laughing.
The Internet and both social and mainstream media are now full of this bilge and worse. There seems to be no end to the parade of charlatans, ‘social commentators’, Internet marketers, ‘SIFs’ (single issue fanatics), ‘health bloggers’, C-list celebrities, lifestyle gurus, wellness warriors and assorted ‘natural healers’, all peddling the ‘right’ to hear ‘both sides’ of whatever health story obsesses them and of course to have the requisite range of ‘natural products’ available in their web store to cure every ailment caused by medical orthodoxy.
As I write this, various countries worldwide are gripped by outbreaks of measles and the situation is predicted to worsen (https://www.vox.com/2019/4/15/18311377/measles-outbreak-2019 (accessed 16th April 2019)). Measles! A disease so potentially devastating that we thought and hoped that, like smallpox, it had almost been consigned to the history books. Not in this ‘justa’ age. Measles is ‘just a rash’, whooping cough is ‘just a cough’ and so on it goes. I would not want to be the one to try to foist that explanation on to the parents of a child who had died of measles or who consequently developed subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. Looking back into my family tree this month I found ancestors who lived in rural Ireland. In 1900 both their six-year-old daughter and one-year-old son died in the same week during an outbreak of ‘morbilli’ – measles. In 2019 the response of many parents is not to bother with vaccination for their children because they saw on Facebook or the like that some sportsperson or actor told them not to vaccinate because vaccines ‘contain chemicals’ or even worse, that they might be a ‘cocktail’ of some other things. Instead, they’ll just throw a potentially lethal ‘measles party’ (Leask, 2015; Lipley, 2000) for some of the local kids where they can gain ‘natural immunity’. You literally could not make this up but I will not cite the exact sources and give them even more of the publicity they crave. We have a whole new generation of parents who thankfully have never known the ravages of infectious childhood diseases and whose naivety is fanned and stoked by the ‘celebrities’ and keyboard warriors of the antivaxx movement.
For children’s nurses and all health professionals involved in children’s health, the question they face is how are they going to engage with this new landscape of information, misinformation and overt, profiteering lies? The ‘health educator’ role that they may have inhabited 10 or 20 years ago has long since passed its sell-by date. What has it been replaced or superseded by? How are child health nurses going to fight for science and knowledge-based child health in the face of anyone who happens to have an opinion and a twitter account, or a personal tragedy story that they are convinced is linked to vaccination, toxic nutrition, wind farms or whatever villain is centre stage in the latest conspiracy theory (Jolley and Douglas, 2014). Certainly, the standby preparation of old in nursing education will not work for nurses today. Designing a new information pamphlet or ‘devising a board game to teach about a, b or c’ is worse than pointless.
If we are serious about preparing students for this brave new world of ‘the battle for attention’ (Galloway, 2017) in a 24-hour news cycle where both quantities and channels of information and misinformation seem infinite, then we need to begin to prepare them in specifics of social media use (Daley et al., 2018; Dredze et al., 2016), social marketing (Bhat-Schelbert et al., 2012), social networking (Baxter and Gorman, 1997; Brunson, 2013), online engagement and other topics that would barely be heard of by many of today’s nurse educators. This demands far more than simply ‘using the Internet’ as if it were a giant filing cabinet or notice board. The nurse influencer of the future will have the nursing nous of a Virginia Henderson combined with the social media savvy of a Taylor Swift. He or she will be engaging online with parents, families and communities not simply ‘informing them’. They will have a solid grasp, not of whether to take on the snake oil sellers and mendacity merchants but of exactly how best to do this (Leask, 2015) so that parents and their children get the best possible information.