Health Education
For healthcare providers looking to bolster their practice:
Health Literacy
Per a report from the the National Institute of Medicine, health literacy is defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” Even people who are literate in their daily lives can struggle with health literacy depending on the medical information and complexity or technicality of the topics. Those with low health literacy are over twice as likely to report poorer health according to some reports. The inability to understand and make critical decisions for their health can significantly impact your patients. Using simple health literacy tests and purposefully designed materials, it is possible to assist patients in bolstering their health literacy.
Patient Self-Efficacy
Those with limited health literacy skills are more likely to be less confident in communicating with healthcare providers. They are also less confident in making health decisions for themselves of loved ones. By addressing their health literacy and communication channels with their providers, patients will be more comfortable and confident in talking with providers and sharing their preferences, concerns, and decisions. This confidence can also help with medication adherence. Helping patients’ confidence helps to empower them so they can be an effective tool in their care.
Personalized Planning
Looking together at your health practice, we can decide on simple tests used to assess the level of your patients’ health literacy in order to gauge the help that they may need. Next steps would then be determined through our discussions and could include building materials for patients that are simple to understand for their health literacy level and serve to give them important information on their condition, treatment, medications, etc. In some cases, direct discussions with patients may be needed in order to effectively educate and empower them.
Program Evaluation
After designing and implementing these interventions, it is important for us to assess their effectiveness through an evaluation. These evaluations can be used to demonstrate the utility of the program, materials, or interventions and in order to further tailor them to maximize effectiveness.
Already have a health education plan or use patient education materials? We can evaluate those too!
If you have any questions or would like to talk more about one of these options, please contact us here!