I was recently asked an important question by a group at a cancer center: “How do we talk about numbers with our patients?”
They were concerned about numeracy, and with good reason. I made a podcast episode that begins to explore this large topic, and today I’m offering a conversation structure and template, based on what I discussed in that episode, to help you enrich the ways you educate patients about numbers.
First, some reminders from that earlier episode:
- All of us have and do numeracy every day, but of different kinds
- There are mathematically sophisticated reasoning processes that ordinary people routinely perform without realizing it, including comparisons, proportions, and uncertainty
- Even people labelled with “low” literacy or numeracy have sophisticated ways of understanding, estimating, calculating and weighing similar to people of “high” literacy or numeracy
- In patient education, it is more helpful to focus on what your patient does with numbers than what they don’t do, in order to explain a new concept involving numeracy
In order to help you be as effective as you can with your patients, our prior podcast episode offered 5 examples of everyday realms where people are already using and interpreting numerical and probabilistic information in rich ways in daily life:
- Food and cooking
- Commerce and finance
- Sports
- Weather
- Travel and transportation
These are areas of life where we all engage in tasks that implicitly involve multiple mathematical domains, such as Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and Probability. They involve skills such as scaling, modeling, and reading graphs. And they require a depth of reasoning or abstraction to engage in them successfully. Importantly, we do these usually without realizing how complex they are, or considering them as “real” math, science, or reasoning skills.
Here are some common numeracy practices, and possible situations in health conversations where similar practices could be used:
| Numeracy practices | Possible Health Context |
| Reading numbers, units, and time | Medication schedules, dosage labels |
| Proportions, percentages, conversions | Lab values, risk statements (“1 in 200”) |
| Probabilities, trade-offs, expected values | Weighing treatment risks and benefits |
| Interpreting uncertainty, trend data, cumulative risk | Clinical trials, lifestyle risk management |
I’ve shared a few common domains and some food for thought. As a health professional who educates patients, you might turn to AI and describe the kinds of numbers or numeracy situations you talk about, and then ask AI for common everyday tasks that use similar mathematical reasoning. See what turns up that makes sense for your context.
I’m inviting you to recognize numeracy as something adults already have and do, not something they lack. Here’s a conversation guide to help you fold this approach into how you are already educating about numbers.
Conversation guide for talking with patients about numbers
Structure:
- Acknowledge the complexity
- Affirm people’s capabilities
- Situate in the everyday
- Make and invite explicit connections
Template:
- “There’s complex ___ involved”
- “But there’s parallels to some complex calculations people do every day”
- “If you’ve ever had to deal with __ or pay attention to __, you’ve dealt with numbers like these. Do you ever do something like this?”
- “Here’s what I see as the similarities… you may see others…”
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