“How do we talk about numbers with our patients?” I was asked this important question recently by a group at a cancer center.
I’ve made a podcast episode and a step-by-step conversation guide. Now I’m offering a one-page pdf download, so you can put it into practice. It’s admittedly a big topic, and this is just the start.
First, some reminders from the podcast 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
- We learn well when something new and unfamiliar is connected to something already known and familiar
- 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
If you have questions, or you’d like more help supporting clinical reasoning in communication, contact me.