Learn two ways you can enhance your knowledge about patient education and communication, while supporting this podcast series.
You listen to this show, so you already know that communication is central to your ability to do your job well. You also know how much patient education matters to outcomes. This episode is about ways that you can get better at both patient education and communication, while supporting this podcast series.
Hi everybody. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel. This is “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners, an independent health-equity oriented education and communication consultancy. If your organization needs expert help on any topic in this series, visit healthcommunicationpartners.com.
Today’s episode sponsored by our friends at Maven Roth Group. Maven Roth is a progressively strong, women-owned creative agency with extensive experience in healthcare marketing, communications and advertising. Do you need an expert refresh on your patient education materials? Maybe your internal communications or onboarding materials? Maven Roth can help with those needs and more! Visit mavenroth.com today.
I do love working with them, we’ve worked together multiple times in the past. and I also love how that particular sponsor read completely works with the topic of this particular episode. This is episode 112, oh my gosh! Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. That means there’s 111 episodes before this, which kind of boggles my mind! I don’t know how many of those you’ve heard. Maybe you’re new here, welcome. Maybe you’ve been with us for a long time, thank you. Thanks for sharing the show, thanks for letting me know what topics that you’d like me to tackle, because this series is based on actual problems in the field. And I’m not sitting around thinking, “Oh, what should I talk about?” So if you haven’t been in touch with me yet, please do write and let me know some of what’s on your mind when it comes to communication, patient education, health literacy.
One of the things I know that brings people back to the series is the reflective practice element of what I do. So what I’m gonna talk about now is about reflective practice, quite a lot actually. Because I am one of the people who believes that issues of communication and education are central to the work of healthcare and public health. Integral to this work. It’s not marginal, it’s not an add-on. The past 20 months have shown us in many ways, that communication and education are at the center, they’re two of the engines of healthcare and public health. So I’m going to tell you about two sets of materials that can help you get better at communication and education. Which is what this whole series is about, which is really at the heart of the work that I do in the health sector. And I’ve made them for you as a way of supporting this self-funded podcast series. So, help me make another 112 episodes and pick up one of these two products! Ok, here we go!
So the first one I want to talk about is how you communicate during patient education. When I’m talking about health communication or health literacy, I always wind up talking about patient education. That makes sense; there’s many connections among those topics. And I’m an educator! But health professionals often get frustrated when the patient education that they’re doing doesn’t have its intended effect. One physician put it to me this way: she said, “When we teach it to them, they show that they are understanding what we’re doing. But they are going home and forgetting.”
That’s frustrating. You don’t want that to happen, but education is a complex endeavor. And yeah your time is short, and there’s a great deal at stake. I’m helping you with some structure, some well-designed questions, and some support. I’ve created materials for you, put them together with our most popular episodes on patient education in a convenient and economical bundle. It’s not about adding one more thing to your already crowded day. This is reflective practice and how reflective practice can help you improve what you are already doing. Help you reflect on your day and the ways you know it can be better. And increasing your own effectiveness in ways that make sense to you and are locally appropriate.
No matter how much time each day you spend a patient education, no matter how you currently do patient education, in this bundle you’ll find something to make that education more effective. You’ll improve what you’re already doing. You’ll see what culturally and linguistically appropriate patient education can look like and sound like. You’ll get educational principles that reach all learners. And you’ll start to view your own patient education differently. I bring the best studies in the world to this. And it’s easy to access! It’s an audio book, an ebook, and exclusive supplementary materials. So I’m going to put a link in the show for how you can get the Effective Patient Education audiobook bundle.
Okay the second one is about bias. Now you know health disparities are due to many factors that are man-made and that one of these is implicit bias. And all over the world, not just in the US, all over the world there’s a lot of attention being given to unconscious bias, implicit bias, and how they show up in health care. And I encounter professionals actively confronting discrimination and bias of all kinds. I was giving a talk about addressing unconscious or implicit bias at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and at the end, one of the questions I received from a participant was: “It sometimes takes a lifetime to create those biases. They sometimes become innate. How do we unlearn those biases?”
Now I want to, I want to look at that question for a second, because this participant is pointing to something that I think is one of the hardest things for people to acknowledge that they need to do. And that’s to look inside. When we’re thinking about bias, really, the only person’s bias we have any control over is our own. So, that’s what I want to help you with because it’s, it’s difficult going. It’s incredibly difficult going. But it’s me, and it’s this show, and I hope at this point you trust me, that I’m going to walk along with you and help you start to reflect on your own language. Because you know, you’ve heard it from me before, when it comes to language it’s remarkably easy to slip into autopilot. And I love the quote from Derald Wing Sue who is responsible for putting microaggressions on on all of our radars. He said something like, “None of us is immune from inheriting the biases of our ancestors.”
So if you are interested in taking your language use seriously, I’ve created an audiobook bundle with resources on addressing unconscious bias in your everyday language, in your everyday practice, and in the organizations where you work. And it’s based on decades of research on bias in language and policy. Of course it all shares a commitment to health equity. Like Effective Patient Education, this is an audiobook, an e-book, and supplementary materials I made for you. I recently redid it to capture some of what was going on in 2020. And it’s about 2 hours of audio, and a bunch of supplementary materials. I’m really proud of the powerpoint show too, because it invites people to think about images. It takes an image-heavy kind of approach to confronting bias in our language, in our thinking. And I made it, so no matter what your specialization is, you know it’s going to help you. And obviously it also helps support this podcast series!
Thank you again for being in touch. If you haven’t written me, go ahead. Let me know what topic youd’ like to see addressed in an upcoming episode. Catch me on the socials, I’m on twitter and linked.
And thanks! It’s Thanksgiving here, or it was yesterday, and I’m thankful for you and thankful for your trust. I’m thankful that we’re all getting through this time together. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Music and audio engineering by Joe Liebel. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel.