When you communicate with patients, you’re not just sharing facts. You’re building trust and a shared understanding. Thinking about health literacy can help. And it’s health literacy month, so what better time?
Research suggests that health professionals’ own comfort with health literacy matters in patient communication. So if you communicate with patients in some way, here’s 6 quick reminders and reflection tools that’ll help you move beyond information delivery to shared decision-making. It’s based on advice I share with clients, and some of our most popular podcasts about health literacy (here and here). There’s also research references throughout, so you can dig in.
You could use these reminders before your next conversation. They can help you reduce some of the friction in health information and services, and create some space for patient thinking and shared decision-making. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Connect with me on LinkedIn.
1. What assumptions am I making about this patient’s medical or scientific knowledge?
- Am I assuming patients’ familiarity with how medications, body systems, or test results work? Have I asked what they already know or have heard about the topic we’re discussing?
- Have I explained the what—but also the why? (“This works this way because…”)
- Did I make the reasoning behind a treatment, referral, or result clear? Did I ask for patients’ preferences and leave room for their judgement in this process?
2. Am I helping make the system more navigable?
- Did I explain next steps in care, not just what happens, but why?
- Have I clarified roles, referrals, and how health info flows across appointments or providers?
- Am I unintentionally assuming knowledge of how healthcare or insurance systems work?
3. Am I using clear, respectful language?
- Did I ask open-ended questions? How else am I showing I value patients’ perspective?
- Have I paused to explain specialized terms, abbreviations, or everyday words with different meanings in medicine (e.g., “critical,” “orientation”)?
- Did I translate technical language or drug names into plain speech?
- Did I use visuals or handouts?
4. Am I supporting patients’ thinking, not just recall?
- Am I helping patients see how facts connect, to support their making sense of things?
- Have I left room for the patient to ask questions like: “Why is this important for me?” or “How else could I think about this?”
5. Am I supporting patients’ active learning?
- Did I offer the patient resources, and where to go for trusted info?
- Have I supported their ability to recognize what they don’t know (and helped them ask), with prompts like “Sometimes people ask about x, or y. Do you want to talk about these, or something else?“
- Am I reinforcing patients’ agency as thinkers, doers, and holders of important information, not just as recipients of care, through my words and tone?
6. Am I recognizing how context shapes our understanding, and our health?
- How have I considered the social determinants of health—like income, education, housing, discrimination, and racism—as factors that shape how patients access, interpret, and act on health information?
- Am I considering that what might appear as a patient’s confusion, silence, or resistance may instead reflect a mismatch between the demands of the system and the patient’s situation?
- Do I remember that literacy, reasoning, and numeracy are influenced by our contexts, and not fixed traits, so I’m offering resources to take home, consider later, and discuss with loved ones?
