Health Literacy Online CME Course

Health Literacy, You talk to your patients, but do they understand? The importance of Health Literacy to your Practice.

This new Health Literacy CME course on the MDcme.ca website is open access thanks to grants from various Canadian organizations. The online course geared to physicians and other healthcare professions, will

"introduce you to the concept of health literacy. It will give an overview of current knowledge about the links between literacy and health outcomes. The goal is to help you understand how health literacy affects your own practice or work setting. It will introduce some practical tools and strategies to identify and address the health literacy needs of your patients/clients, and the barriers that you may inadvertently create to patient/client understanding."

Registration is required.

Nurses, how well are you Communicating with your Patients?

According to a recent exploratory study, there is much room for improvement in the education of patients regarding their health care, with much of the onus falling on nurses. So this begs the question, how well are our nursing students being educated to deliver patient education? In fact, are our nursing students being taught the critical issues surrounding health literacy? The study, published in the ANA's Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, urges:

"...health literacy is a topic that should be threaded throughout the entire nursing curriculum and stressed in each clinical rotation.
New nursing graduates need to be able to:
(a) identify patients at risk for not being able to understand and act on health information,
(b) communicate health information and instructions in a way that promotes patient understanding,
(c) check for patient understanding."

Citation: Sand-Jecklin, K., Murray, B., Summers, B., Watson, J., ( July, 23, 2010) "Educating Nursing Students about Health Literacy: From the Classroom to the Patient Bedside " OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing Vol. 15 No. 3.
DOI: 10.3912/OJIN.Vol15No03PPT02

Assessing and Addressing Health Literacy

A new CE module has been made available from the Online Journal of Issues in Nursing (OJIN) called "Assessing and Addressing Health Literacy".
The American Nurses Association (ANA) is freely offering this course online to it's members. Non-members may still read the article and take the post-test.

"The ability to communicate effectively with patients who have low health literacy depends on our ability to recognize this problem and to create a patient-centered and shame-free healthcare environment."

Health Information Literacy: How it Impacts Your Patients

Close to half of all American adults have trouble understanding and using basic health information [states a recent report from the Institute of Medicine]. Most consumer health information and patient education materials are written at the 10th grade level or higher, while the majority of the population read at an 8th grade level or lower, and that is without the medical jargon!

So why worry?

~ "Literacy is the strongest predictor of health status – more than age, income, employment status, race or ethnicity, and educational level!
~ Emergency room patients with inadequate literacy skills are 2X's more likely to be hospitalized.
~ Patients with poor literacy skills are 5X's more likely to misinterpret their prescriptions.
~ People with low literacy skills have 4X's greater annual health costs.
~ The FDA, JCAHO, and NCQA require health care institutions to document evidence that patients have understood the medical information provided to them."

But what can you do about it? How can you identify patients with low literacy?
How can you improve communication with your patients?
Click on the title or here for excellent resources from the Medical Library Association to help you understand and address this issue.