Digital Interventions Against Cancer Misinformation

Ella Doran

Ella Doran was awarded an SFI LERO PhD Scholarship in partnership with Breakthrough Cancer Research. She is working as a PhD student with Dr. Gillian Murphy at University College Cork.

Cancer misinformation might pertain to prevention of cancer, screening for cancer and/or treatment for cancer. In the era of easy internet access and social media, it is simply unrealistic to expect patients not to seek out information about their own condition; instead, we must equip patients with the tools to evaluate information and empower them to make more informed healthcare decisions.

In this project, we are seeking to utilise digital tools in a positive and responsible manner, to develop interventions that help patients and members of the wider public to both know the difference between reliable and unreliable online information and to use this knowledge in practice. While misinformation related to cancer is often targeted directly at patients, people in the wider community are friends, family, colleagues and neighbours of cancer patients, and are potential future patients themselves. These people are often the source of misinformation to patients, so it is important to also tackle acceptance and sharing of misinformation among this group.

We will utilize input from patient representatives at all stages of the project to define our focus and objectives as we:

1. Develop and test misinformation interventions in healthy populations and less clinically vulnerable groups.

2. Evaluate the effectiveness and acceptability of selected interventions in target patient groups.

3. Develop and evaluate intervention delivery methods, in digital and non-digital formats.

4. Disseminate our findings in a manner that will be useful for developers, platforms, regulators, patients, and medical professionals.