We’re celebrating our 8th anniversary, and health literacy month! Here’s some of our most popular health literacy advice, condensed into a 6-item checklist for health professionals, to support health literacy and patient-centered communication.
It’s health literacy month, and it’s the 8th anniversary of this podcast series! I always like celebrating our anniversary and health literacy month together. So this year what I’m gonna do is gather up some of our most popular health literacy advice from the show over the years, into a handy-dandy 6 item checklist for you, as a reminder for when you are trying to go out and do the good thing and help improve health literacy.
Hi everybody, this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Since 2017, yep, every 2 weeks, 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 often 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 got into our work to make.
So, hey, hi, hi! If you’re new to the show, welcome! This is a heck of a time to have an anniversary, right? We’ve spent, what is this, nine weeks now? With all of our episodes that we’ve released over the last 9 weeks—that’s 5 of them have all landed in the Top 5% of podcasts worldwide for downloads for the first 7 days. And that’s just amazing to me, after 8 years of doing this. Showing up, chugging along, just kind of doing our thing, being in our groove. The word kind of spread slowly. But then to have this like, boom! Wow, this is unexpected! So welcome. I’m super glad you’re here.
And I have a question for you. I’m not really on social media, but with new listeners, I kind of want to make it easier for people to get in touch with me. Yes, you can always visit health communication partners and click on contact. Yes, you can always email me, Anne Marie, at H-C Partners.com and you can connect with me or message me on Linked in. Where else are you hanging out? I want to know! Tell me, so that I can come meet you there, ok? Because you’re why I’m here. You’re why I’ve kept going for 8 years. We’re in this together, this teaching and learning space.
This show, I hope, gives you time to stop and think about something that we can very easily take for granted because we’re doing it all the time, communication, right? And give you some tools to think with and some people to think with, too. So if this kind of approach matters to you, please help us grow the show. Please share this episode with a friend. Subscribe rate and review, I read them. And support us by a donation to the show. Even five bucks helps with our production and hosting costs. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
So like I said yeah it’s health literacy month. And you already know a whole lot about health literacy. So I wanted to kind of focus on things that have happened in the last couple years in the health literacy world. I think one of the biggest changes that a lot of us have been excited about, is the move from seeing health literacy as a problem, first, and then a problem that resides mainly in patients. And the focus being on what patients don’t know, don’t do, don’t say, don’t have. And if only they would fix all those things in themselves, then our systems would work better, right? There’s a lot of problems in that kind of thinking. So fortunately, we’ve got more of a turn to what sometimes gets called organizational health literacy. And I think, more broadly, to health literacy as an interaction between people and texts and contexts.
When we as professionals get to think about health literacy as an interaction, it helps us in a lot of ways. And one of those is by giving us something that we can work with. That is, our own communication. That’s something we can impact directly, right? How are we communicating? How are we educating? How are we thinking about these processes? And of course, that’s what a lot of this show is about. I’d had a client ask for a checklist as part of a project that we were doing. And it was their idea. And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. And it worked out really well. So I thought, why don’t I try to do a checklist for the show?
So I have a couple of our early episodes on health literacy, and a whole bunch of research references linked to, in the show notes for this episode. You can see that transcript and transcripts for all of our episodes at healthcommunicationpartners .com. I’m going to give you all six of these kind of pointers or reminders of things that you probably already know, but it’s good to be grounded in. And then I’ll go back through them and see, okay, let’s dig a little deeper. What is it that you can do in your practice today with your next patient or client?
- What assumptions am I making about this patient’s medical or scientific knowledge?
- Am I helping make the system more navigable?
- Am I using clear, respectful language?
- Am I supporting patients’ thinking?
- Am I supporting patients’ active learning?
- Am I remembering that context shapes our understandings, as well as our health?
Those are kind of a quick trip through a lot of the advice that I’ve given at different times during this show. But let me go ahead and dig into each of those with some ideas about how this could show up in your practice.
#1 What assumptions am I making about this patient’s medical or scientific knowledge? Am I assuming some level of familiarity with how medications or 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 to them what’s going on and also why? Like, “this works this way because.” And did I make the reasoning behind a treatment or a referral or a result clear? Did I ask for patients’ preferences and leave room for their judgment in this process?
#2 is, am I helping make the system more navigable, right? Funny word. Did I explain the next steps in their care? Not just what happens, but why? Have I clarified people’s roles or explained referrals, how health information and how people flow across appointments or across providers? Have I talked about their knowledge of how health care systems or insurance systems work? Or have I made sure that there’s somebody who can talk to them about that?
All right. #3, am I using clear, respectful language? Did I ask open–ended questions? How else am I showing that I value patients’ perspectives? Have I paused to explain any specialized terms, any abbreviations, or any everyday words that have different meanings in a medical context. Did I translate technical language into plain speech? And did I use visuals or handouts? I told you this is going to be a lot of stuff that you already do and know, right? These are reminders, really.
#4, am I supporting patients thinking? And here we’re talking about not just recall. Am I helping people to make sense of things. Because that’s what patients are trying to do, it’s what we’re all trying to do all the time: make sense of things. So remember that you’re trying to help them see how facts connect to one another. You want to leave room for them to ask questions like “Why is this important for me?” or “How else could I be thinking about this?”
#5. Am I supporting patients’ active learning? Did I offer the patient resources or tell them where to go for trusted information? Have I supported their ability to recognize what they don’t know and helped them ask? Maybe with prompts like, “Sometimes people ask me about X or Y. Do you want to talk about either of those? Has something else come to mind?” And, am I reinforcing patients’ agency as thinkers and doers and holders of important information, not just as recipients of care? And you’re doing that through your language and through your tone.
#6, am I recognizing that context shapes our understandings as well as our health? And that might look like you’re considering the social determinants of health as factors that shape how your patient accesses care, how they interpret and act on health information. Am I considering that what might appear as a patient’s confusion or silence or resistance might instead be reflecting a mismatch between the demands of the system and the patient’s current situation. And finally, do I remember that literacy and reasoning and numeracy are influenced by our contexts? They’re not fixed traits. So I’m offering resources for people to take home, consider later, and discuss with loved ones.
If this kind of work matters to you, you are in the right spot, and I’ve got good news. I can work with you and your organization. Be in touch with me. Again let me know where you are on the socials so I can come and join you there. And thank you, thank, you thank you for being here and for celebrating 8 years with us!