How podcasts can help patients with health literacy, KevinMD.com

by Robert Rodvien, MD

When a person is told that they have a serious illness, they are similar to Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

They enter a bewildering new world of discussions, tests and treatment programs that must be navigated while maintaining a job, life obligations, and relationships with friends and family. Just when a person needs more resilience to stress, anxiety can occur. The ability to function is often diminished in such a state, and, like Alice, many begin to grope for solutions. Patients, family members and friends begin to rely on anecdotes. Others find hope-based messages more acceptable than evidence-based ones. Some patients are willing to do anything that appears constructive even if there is no evidence of success.

Some patients seek to become experts in their field of illness and venture on-line to do so, but entering the world of medicine on-line often creates misguided but nonetheless strongly held beliefs. Much of the accessible material is jargon and advertising rather than unbiased information. Web sites and brochures are rife with marketing language to promote a hospital, company or pharmaceutical product, leaving many who seek information as wary consumers instead of informed patients.

via kevinmd.com

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Presentation Cites Ways to Counteract Low Health Literacy | National Nursing News

Although low health literacy is a significant barrier to quality care, especially among elderly patients, a recent presentation noted how increased use of simple health literacy assessment tests by nurses and clinicians can help improve communication and health outcomes.

Several screening tools are available to assess health literacy but are underutilized, according to a presentation at the 36th Annual Congress of the Oncology Nursing Society by Ellen C. Mullen, RN, ANP-BC, GNP-BC, nurse practitioner in the Lymphoma and Myeloma Center at The University of MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Furthermore, nurses and other health professionals routinely underestimate the prevalence of limited health literacy — the degree to which an individual can obtain, process and understand health information needed to make appropriate health decisions — and overestimate patients’ ability to understand medical information.

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HHS Releases National Plan to Improve Health Literacy | HHS.gov

Today, the United States Department of Health and Human Services released The National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy aimed at making health information and services easier to understand and use. The plan calls for improving the jargon-filled language, dense writing, and complex explanations that often fill patient handouts, medical forms, health web sites, and recommendations to the public.

According to the report, efforts to improve the health literacy skills of both the public and health professionals are needed to achieve a health literate society—a critical need as health reform generates more demand for consumer and patient information that is easy-to-understand and culturally and linguistically appropriate.

According to research from the U.S. Department of Education, only 12 percent of English-speaking adults in the United States have proficient health literacy skills. The overwhelming majority of adults have difficulty understanding and using everyday health information that comes from many sources, including the media, web sites, nutrition and medicine labels, and health professionals.

“Health literacy is needed to make health reform a reality,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Without health information that makes sense to them, people can’t access cost effective, safe, and high quality health services. But, HHS can’t do it alone,” she added. “We need payers and providers of health care services to communicate clearly and make the necessary changes to improve their communication with consumers, patients, and beneficiaries. Today’s plan is only the beginning of a long-term process with our many partners in all sectors that we hope will result in a society that encourages people to live longer, healthier lives.”

via hhs.gov

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Helping Patients Understand Their Medical Treatment - Kaiser Health News

An elderly woman sent home from the hospital develops a life-threatening infection because she doesn't understand the warning signs listed in the discharge instructions. A man flummoxed by an intake form in a doctor's office reflexively writes "no" to every question because he doesn't understand what is being asked. A young mother pours a drug that is supposed to be taken by mouth into her baby's ear, perforating the eardrum. And a man in his 70s preparing for his first colonoscopy uses a suppository as directed, but without first removing it from the foil packet.

Each of these examples provided by health-care workers or patient advocates illustrates one of the most pervasive and under-recognized problems in medicine: Americans' alarmingly low levels of health literacy — the ability to obtain, understand and use health information.

Translating Medical Jargon

Some technical terms and what they mean in plain English:

• "myocardial infarction" (heart attack)
• "hyperlipidemia" (high cholesterol)
• "febrile" (feverish)

A 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that 36 percent of adults have only basic or below-basic skills for dealing with health material. This means that 90 million Americans can understand discharge instructions written only at a fifth-grade level or lower. About 52 percent had intermediate skills: They could figure out what time a medication should be taken if the label says "take two hours after eating," while the remaining 12 percent were deemed proficient because they could search a complex document and find the information necessary to define a medical term.

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Nearly 60% of paid home caregivers make medication errors, study finds - McKnight's Long Term Care News

One-third of paid caregivers who work for clients who live in their own homes had difficulty reading and understanding health-related information and instructions. Furthermore, 60% of them made medication errors involving their clients, according to Northwestern University researchers, who say the study is the first of its kind.

Investigators at the university recruited 100 paid, non-family caregivers in the Chicago area and evaluated their literacy with health-related tasks and knowledge. While researchers emphasized that the majority of caregivers are good people who are trying to support their families, medication-error levels are a serious cause of concern.

They found that most paid caregivers are women with an average age of 50 years old. Many are foreign born with limited schooling. They are usually paid about $9 an hour, though almost one-third earns less than minimum wage.

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