It’s still Health Literacy Month, and we’re still celebrating. One of the newest terms to come out of health literacy is health numeracy. This is people’s familiarity and skills with numbers, plus a whole lot more, in the context of their health, health care, and wellness. When professionals ask me about patient’s numeracy and health numeracy, I’ve noticed that there’s often a whole lot of concern that comes along with this conversation. There’s kind of an emotional weight behind it. So today I’m going to hopefully give you ways to reduce the stress around numeracy and two concrete steps you can take the next time you’re talking numeracy with a patient.
Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Since 2017, we’ve been giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator specializing in communication and education. This podcast digs into what we can take for granted about communication in our professional lives. Especially in healthcare and public health, and increasingly across sectors because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we’ve got into our work to make. Did you know we’ve got a newsletter? You should get it. It’s good. Visit healthcommunicationpartners.com.
It’s Health Literacy Month, and it’s the ninth anniversary of this podcast series this month, too. And I’ll tell you, there’s been plenty of moments over the nine years that I’ve been just fumbling and just smacking my head like, gosh, why didn’t I think of that? Like, why did it take me until about a year ago, so like eight years in the series to do an episode on numeracy. I’m a literacy expert! Like, why? Why oh, why did it take so long?
So finally, Health Literacy Month last year, I did a three-part series on numeracy. Obviously, I’ll put the links into the show notes (“How do we talk about numbers?” Working with numbers in Shared Decision-Making Talking with patients about randomization) because numbers in healthcare are everywhere and public health too. They’re in a lot of decision-making. They’re in treatment plans. They’re in medications. And you might be sharing health information that involves complex numbers and calculation and reasoning on patients’ parts.
You’ve also maybe got patients who’ve been using AI to get health information, including health probabilities or risks. And now you’re having to explain that information and how it compares to what you have and what you know.
I’m also thinking about where people are having to understand evidence and some probability in order to make some important decisions about their lives. You know, there’s options, harms, benefits, you’ve got risk information. And you want to be effective when you’re communicating and educating about this because you want patients to be able to make informed decisions and have the best outcomes possible.
So I understand the gravity of these situations, the situations that you’re in, they’re often high stakes, they’re complex. And the decisions that people have to make are consequential, sometimes permanent. So I hear how carefully you are thinking about this. And I think much of what’s behind the concern about patient numeracy is genuine concern about your role as a professional, your responsibility to make sense of that complexity with them and for them.
And I want to support that because this is hard. So what I’m going to share, I hope can inform what you’re already talking about when you talk about numbers, when you want to explain a complex numeric concept. Maybe it’s uncertainty or risk or comparisons, options, benefits, harms. I hope to give you some new options and maybe reduce some stress in the process because the way I see numeracy from the literacy field, it’s like something that we do constantly. It’s part of everyday life. You could think of us all as having different kinds of numeracy or needing to use different kinds of numeracy in different situations that life presents us with.
And in those prior episodes a year ago on numeracy, I mentioned something that people appreciated. So I’m just going to repeat it here. And you could think about us as having formal numeracy practices and informal numeracy practices, the things that we do everyday life.
The formal ones being what you might think of as school-based numeracy, anything you had to learn in school, in college. So, you know, all the way from arithmetic, multiplication when you were little, all the way through to all of the STEM fields and your advanced studies. Anything you had to learn in school, we’re thinking about that as like formal numeracy.
We all also have informal numeracy. These are the everyday kinds of calculations, estimations, comparisons that we do just as part of life as adults. These also are forms of mathematical reasoning, but we don’t necessarily reach for like a formal principle or tool while we’re doing them.
Everyone, including your patients, already has formal and informal numeracy. Some of the underlying math concepts in informal numeracy might surprise you because we don’t really get to stop and think about it in our lives. So that’s the one I’m going to talk most about today is informal numeracy, this kind of everyday math.
Why is knowing this important? So you have more options and more tools to explain anything involving numbers or computations to your patients. Because you want that patient to have an understanding that allows them to make an informed decision. And relating the thing you have to talk about to something that they already experience in everyday life is a way of building that understanding.
So I’m going to share with you five general areas. No, six, there’s six in this list! General areas where we all have everyday informal numeracy going on. And it’s surprisingly complex when you look below the surface.
I’ll start off with a conversation I had with a clinician just last month. We were talking about statistics. And she was like, are patients really going to get this? And I said, sure. Patients use statistics every day. And she got quiet and she thought about it for a moment. And then she looks at me and she goes, “like the weather.” I said, yeah. She said, “40% chance of rain. I’m taking my umbrella.” Well, yep, that’s it. That’s a great place to start, the weather, because our understanding of how we’re going to act based on a forecast is largely because of our past experience with forecasts and our understanding of percentages.
The next one is food and cooking! heading into the holidays. So think about how much math and science is involved in shopping for food, planning a meal, budgeting for that meal. If you’ve run out of an ingredient and you need to substitute it with another. And then there’s all of the math and science involved in the actual cooking. So if you’re someone who likes to cook, this could be a fun place to stop and think about: wow, there is an awful lot of computation, estimation, and probability involved with cooking.
Another, sports. All right, sports fans, you already know there’s a lot of math and science here. If you’re playing sports right? So much measurement, so much arithmetic, so much geometry and physics. If you’re loving watching sports like me, although the Eagles this year, come on guys, come on! As fans, we’re used to statistics, we’re used to probability, risk, looking ahead at the rest of the schedule.
So come on, Go Birds! Let’s do it!
Another realm where we all use numbers is money. Household budgets, personal finance is math. So savings, loans, budgeting, investing, insurance, debt, running a small business, all of these involve so many numbers. The underlying math concepts, you’re talking about evaluating risks, percentages, compound interest, predictions, probability, and comparisons.
I’ve talked before because this one’s just fascinating to me how really complicated it is: Travel and transportation. We all do it every day. And there’s so many different calculations here. I think it’s so complex because there are so many different variables. Because we’re talking about real world math, right? This isn’t a math quiz. This is the real world where everybody else who’s also out there traveling is one of the biggest variables. We learn to calculate without even thinking, just automatically, we consider this. The time of day, another big variable.
The day of the week makes a difference. The time of year makes a difference. And yet we make all of these calculations automatically without thinking. And then there’s the sheer number of different ways we could travel, the different paths we could take. So enormously complex calculations going on with travel and transportation.
And lastly, our phones. I just replaced my cell phone. So you’ve got comparison shopping for the phone. Then what about your plan? What does it do to your monthly bill? Then you’ve got to set it up. And then maintaining it, just using it as a tool, keeping it going, let alone all of the permissions and then using all of the apps. Phones are enormously complex in terms of the literacy and numeracy demands that it makes of us. But yet, we use them every day.
So if you’re worried about the complexity of what you have to explain, please fret not! Everyday life involves enormous mathematical and computational complexity. And we all manage to do it. So here’s those two tips I said I would end with.
- First of all, yeah, take that pressure off yourself. Instead of asking, how can I make this person understand this percentage–whatever you need to explain–ask instead, what are some ways this person already encounters percentages in everyday life?
- Then, go ahead and jump on AI. Describe the kinds of numbers or numeracy situations you have to explain a lot. Ask the AI what kinds of mathematical reasoning is used with that. Then go ahead and tell it to generate some common everyday tasks that use similar mathematical reasoning. And have these in your back pocket the next time you’ve got to talk numeracy with a patient.
If you’d like more help with this, get in touch. Visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, audio engineering and music from Joe Liebel, additional music from Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, LLC.
