Communicator - 

As a nurse or nurse practitioner, how will your articulation be received by your patients and/or caregiver in a clinical encounter? When responding to health literacy challenges verbal communication between patient and clinician should be within the same language realm. Essential HT and/or with DM daily care maintenance will only work when the patient fully understands his and/or her health condition and without a full aggressive approach toward the illness, a shorten life-span will exist. Therefore, speak clearly and slowly toward your patient using plain, non-medical language. If need be, show or draw pictures, limit the amount of information provided to the patient due to feeling possibly overwhelmed. Also, you may repeat the information given, using a teach-back or show-me technique and create a shame-free environment for your patients.

Note: A teach-back and/or show-me technique is particularly important because they involve asking the patient to explain or demonstrate what the nurse and/or practitioner has discussed. Teach-back techniques ask the patient to explain what he/she understood and show-me techniques have the patient demonstrate a skill level learned during the healthcare encounter.

It would be almost a ‘given’ to say that as a practicing nurse, you will come across patients with metabolic X syndrome and idiopathic secondary disorders or diseases such as chronic kidney disease (i.e., CKD), cardiovascular disease (i.e., CVD), and respiratory disease (i.e., RD). Just addressing the medication therapy alone would do an injustice for the patient and his/or her family members. There must be a willing spirit to grasp and maintain life changing ways. Due to the fact that we live in a non-perfect world, each patient will not obey or follow the recommended guidelines set forth through the AHA and/or the ANA. For these special patients you may need a follow-up visit by the social worker, care-giver, or a state-funded agency that would enter the home and talk with the patient and/or with family members.

Note: It may not be enough to assume that effective communication will occur just because a shared language of communication was established. A patient’s perception of articulation extends beyond ‘correct’ language usage (i.e., Spanish language for a Spanish speaker), to include dialects (i.e., Hispanic versus Cuban or South American), and often critical, non-verbal aspects such as the presence or absence of eye contact, physical contact, and body posture. The message conveyed by a primary care nurse or clinician looking at the patient and leaning forward is strikingly different than the message conveyed if looking at the medical record chart and sitting back against the wall.

Nearly all patients prefer medical advice that is simple and easy to understand. In many cases, advice can be simplified by reducing the content to what the patient truly needs to know to follow essential instructions, because adult education theory points out that adults are most interested in information that helps solve their problems, rather than in background information. [11]ʹ[12] For example, most patients are more interested in learning what they need to do to manage their diabetes so they can resume their daily activities, and less interested in disease pathophysiology.

Improving Communication levels -

As a professional, it may be left in your hands to determine the best ways to communicate with your patients. There may be current efforts focus on revising written educational materials to a simpler level, and a few studies have shown that simpler written materials can improve knowledge. [13]ʹ[14] Sometimes you need to ask questions first, on the level of approach you or your team will be engaging. For example:

· What is the best way to communicate medical information (e.g., metabolic syndrome), to patients?

· What is the minimum content required for patients to achieve their self-management goals and what is the literacy demand of the task(s) we are asking the patient to carry out?

· Would visual aids, C.D.’s and/or multimedia technologies improve patients’ understanding of their medical disorder and can they do so more effectively than simplified written materials?

· How should clinicians and practitioners approach decision making with patients who do not understand informed consent?

· What is the most cost-effective ways to enhance compliance when patients have poor health literacy?

Educational Indicators -

The aging of the ‘baby boomers’ (e.g., 1954 through 1965), are expected to have a major implication in this arena since enhanced educational experience is a major trend among demographics. For example, one national survey of older US citizens found that the Internet is becoming an increasingly important resource: Note that less than 35 % (i.e., ±SD), of current seniors age 65 and older have gone online, but more than 75% (i.e., ± SD), of the next generation of seniors (age 50 through 64) have already done so. [15]

Today in the US according to the New York Times and the Washington Post, the national average reading and comprehended levels are between the 7th and 8th grade level of learning. [16] Of the adult US citizens close to 25% cannot read with full comprehension the news print. [17] {Please see footnote 17, for complete NALS findings}. Have your Nursing Education Department seek out health materials that are written at or below the 8th grade level. Remember that patients will probably not want to read pages and pages of words alone, so have pictures or diagrams, that can be translated in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner; such materials are preferred for all literacy levels because they provide a baseline of information about the medical condition. There will also be patients able to function at a higher literacy level and may wish to seek out further information on their own.

<< Previous    1  [2]  3  4  5    Next >>