5 reasons not understanding your doctor can be deadly| Opinion
Teresa Canfield is a regional nurse manager for Mount Carmel Health System. Jayne Moreau is program director of health system patient education for The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Cathy Patton is senior consultant of patient education for OhioHealth. Marcie L. Rehmar is director of community education at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
We all know that keeping our cholesterol level, blood pressure, and body weight within a healthy range is important to our well-being and a long life. There’s another measure that is also important for good health that is not as well-known outside the health professions.
It is called our health literacy level, and it has to do with how well a person can find, understand and use information regarding his or her health situation.
What patients don't know can kill
It doesn’t grab the headlines like a major disease outbreak or natural disaster, but research has shown that when a person has low health literacy, they experience more visits to the emergency department, have longer hospital stays, more anxiety, worse health outcomes, and even greater risk of death, compared to patients with higher health literacy.
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We work at central Ohio’s four major hospital systems, and it’s our job to make sure our physicians, nurses and other care providers are helping patients improve their health literacy each time they visit us.
This means making sure that patients not only have the information they need, but that is also given to them in a culturally sensitive and understandable way.
A patient’s ability to make healthy choices, to live with a chronic health condition, to follow their specific medication or therapy regimen, and to fully recover from an illness or injury depends greatly on knowing what they must do and how to do it once they leave the doctor’s office or hospital.
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This may sound simple, but there are all sorts of conditions that interfere with good communication and understanding between a healthcare provider and patient.
What patients hear
First, is the stress of the situation itself.
We often don’t know what to expect when we’re seeing a health provider — will it be good news or not-so-good news? And after we hear the first few sentences, we may miss the rest of what’s said as our mind processes the news and considers what’s next.
How health providers speak
Another challenge to good health literacy are the words medical and health professionals use to communicate with each other. These words, while good for discussing a patient’s specific case and determining the best therapies for treating them, is often too complex to use when talking to the average patient.
Does it make more sense to you that you experienced a myocardial infarction or a heart attack? A transient ischemic attack or a stroke?
We emphasize plain-language descriptions in all the patient education materials our providers give patients, which even highly educated patients appreciate.
Bridging the language barrier
And speaking of language, in the multicultural community that central Ohio has become in the past 20 years, our hospitals and clinics see many patients for whom English is not their primary language.
Each year, our four hospital systems review statistics on our past year’s patients to determine where educational materials in other languages can be of greatest help.
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One of the most successful collaborations among our hospitals has been the Health Information Translations website that houses more than 3,500 documents in up to 19 languages on a wide variety of diseases and conditions, and other health topics such as diet and exercise. Read more about Health Information Translations in the sidebar accompanying this story.
Our hospitals and medical offices also provide interpreters to bridge the language gap between provider and patient at no additional cost to the patient.
Factoring in culture
Cultural and religious beliefs also play a part in a patient’s understanding of the instructions they’re given. For example, Western medical practices can be confusing to some patients.
Our interpreters and educational materials take many of these considerations into account, encouraging health providers to ask patients if they have concerns about their care plan and, if yes, to explore other ways a patient can accomplish the same goal but in a way that better fits their cultural or religious beliefs.
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One of the most effective communication and teaching methods we encourage our providers to use is called “teach back.” In teach back, we ask the patient to demonstrate or “show us” what we just instructed them to do at home. As we observe their replay, we can offer additional advice or coaching, and a hearty “Bravo!” when they get it right.
October is Health Literacy Month, and we’re encouraged each year that the health providers in our hospitals and clinics are better prepared than ever to help patients grow their health literacy. Each one of us can improve our health and well-being by becoming more health literate.
You’re never too old – or too young – to boost your health literacy.
Teresa Canfield is a regional nurse manager for Mount Carmel Health System. Jayne Moreau is program director of health system patient education for The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Cathy Patton is senior consultant of patient education for OhioHealth. Marcie L. Rehmar is director of community education at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Opinion: What is health literacy and how can it be improved?
