I was coaching a physician on making his patient education more effective. He was understandably frustrated, as many physicians are, over the short amount of time he has with each patient.
We talked about the many constraints around patient education. His voice raised and he sounded exasperated:
“I can’t follow my patient home!”
There are many ways to interpret this phrase. It has stayed with me as I continue to work with providers on communication, education, and health literacy.
Though ‘context’ is a broad term, home is certainly an important context in all our lives. Whatever home looks like, wherever it is, whatever it means to each of us.
Today, I invite you to think a moment with me about home, as we consider the impact of context in health communication and education.
And as usual, I’ll close with some practical advice for how you can keep context in mind, during your next patient encounter.
Context matters
Context matters to us when we interact as people. What is appropriate or valued in one interaction is not in another. We all change our language according to context.
To understand people’s health-related actions and words, it is helpful to consider the influence of context. I’m an educator, so I have a sense of what that means in education. And over the last few years I’ve been learning more about how context influences different health and health care conversations.
In this short essay I’m pulling from studies that are taking linguistic and anthropological perspectives on the study of language, learning, and literacy. This involves looking beyond the immediate context—the individual patient– to family, community, and organizational settings.
Context shapes our language
The language we use depends a great deal on context. That’s not surprising, but it’s important to remember.
When we talk, or watch, or even when we read, we are interacting with other people and with our environment. When we interact through spoken and written language, we do it in a specific place and time.
For instance, we can quickly change our language to communicate the same idea to different audiences. Switching between the different people in our lives, we communicate differently.
A medical educator and I were talking about the impact of context on language. She offered me a hypothetical scenario:
Consider when you come home from work on a typical day. Maybe you’re a parent, and you and your young child are talking about your day. You might say, ‘mommy helped someone who was very sick today.’ And then your spouse asks about your day, and you say, ‘Oh yeah I was in the OR for hours doing an appendectomy.’ Then your cell phone rings and it’s your colleague recapping and reporting on the patient. You get into an entirely different kind of talk.
Same event. Different people, so different language.
Our language shapes context
What’s more, language and context are in a mutual relationship.
Yes, we use the language we use because of our contexts. Yet our contexts are what they are partly because of the language we use in them.
For instance, the patient encounter is the patient encounter partly because of the kinds of language used in it. Those predictable questions and answers. The expected flow of conversation. Language is part of what makes the patient encounter what it is.
To illustrate: Imagine everything in your next patient encounter remained the same, except the language. Same people, same place and time, same stuff in the room.
But let’s say you and the patient took turns telling jokes the whole time. It would no longer be a typical patient encounter.
It would be fun, though.
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Our thinking is tied to context
Decades of research show that context matters to our thinking. This is in contrast to the conventional view of our mental abilities as essentially fixed. This includes reasoning, as well as literacy and numeracy processes.
For example, on formal assessments, people can seem to lack the kinds of cognitive abilities they are able to demonstrate in life.
More than a generation ago, researchers wanted to study reasoning in context. They chose to study arithmetic reasoning of American adults while shopping in the supermarket. They found that, while shopping, adults from varied educational backgrounds were able to make virtually error-free price comparisons.
However, given the same kinds of choice problems in a test, all made many errors.
Anthropologist and educator Fred Erickson points out that:
“Human reasoning seems to consist of skills that are reflexively constituted in the context of situation of use and purpose. This is a conception of thinking as sets of domain-specific and situation-specific operations rather than sets of general abilities.” (p. 529)
It can be easy to overlook how much the cognitive dimensions of our everyday activities are shaped by the people we’re with, and the contexts we’re in.
Our health is related to context
You are likely aware of the social determinants of health, the body of research into the “socio-economic factors that affect health, including income, education, employment, housing, food security, gender, and race” (Social Determinants of Health, 3rd ed.)
This work takes a close look at the relationships between our health, and the contexts where we live, learn, work, and play.
Critical considerations of context have increased. Conversations across the health sector are moving away from reliance on the individual biomedical model toward upstream causes of illness and disease. This includes identifying poverty, structural racism, and discrimination as root causes of health inequalities.
Though researchers take up SDOH in different ways, it seems to me there is at least one shared understanding: Health is not a level playing field.
What you can do right now
The next time you communicate with, or educate a patient:
In whatever language feels natural to you, acknowledge that you know context matters. It matters to how you’re both talking, thinking, and feeling. Where you are, the time pressures, and social relationships all are contexts that make a difference.
Home makes a difference to what happens between you and your patient in the encounter. And yet what happens between you in the encounter can make a difference –to you both–at home.
You may not be able to follow your patient home, as the physician at the start lamented. But you can ask about it. Because home is a powerful context.
Effective Patient Education Audiobook Bundle
This bundle of audiobook, eBook, and supplementary materials will help make your life easier. And it might change the way you think about patient education, no matter your specialization or patient population. You get practical, culturally and linguistically relevant advice and research-based tools, in an unfussy, conversational format. All sales support this podcast series.
$19.99
