Healthy Literacy

I loved reading the AMA article about health literacy. It really connects with my research interests in physician-patient relationships and improving physician empathy. As a side note, this article will serve as a valuable addition to the literature review that will contribute to the anticipated sequel of my thesis manuscript. After I study the relationship between physician empathy and various influential factors for my thesis, I look forward to ultimately developing a curriculum to train medical students to provide quality, empathetic patient care. Throughout this proposed training, the physicians-to-be (students) will be placed in various situations/tasks in which each of them will assume the role of the patient. One of the tasks will require students to navigate the health care system with a designated disability such as deafness, paralysis, and/or illiteracy (or dyslexia). The experience will allow the medical students an opportunity to see health care from the patient's perspective and to consider how to communicate with and connect with hard-to-reach patients.

Aside from my thesis, I felt this article enlightened me in other ways as well. In my current place of employment, I work as a social worker in an inpatient psychiatric hospital conducting psychosocial assessments of each patient. While we regularly consider whether the patient has vision/hearing impairments, language barriers, and/or developmental disabilities that may interfere with patient communication, our psychosocial assessments do not specifically assess for literacy. In addition to this, most of the patient education and follow-up care instructions are provided to patient through written materials, including medication instructions, side effects, and follow-up outpatient psychiatric/therapy appointments. It had never occurred to me before that some of our English-speaking patients may be illiterate and unable to understand follow-up instructions for discharge. A patient's misunderstand or failure to follow the doctor's aftercare instructions can be potentially life-threatening or can trigger a recurrence of symptoms.

I feel particularly motivated to begin asking the patients I encounter to read a sample aloud in order to identify whether the patient can read. Furthermore, it seems equally helpful to apply the concepts described with the SMOG readability test in my verbal communications as well (i.e., limited polysyllabic words, specialized medical jargon without clarified definitions).

Shannon