Is Your Practice Health Literacy Aware?

Highmark’s Health Equity & Quality Services mission is to help providers improve health literacy, as well as provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services to our members.

As health care providers, you play a vital role as the connection to the health services your patients need. You also play a vital role as a trusted source of health information.

Your patients can only make the most of the resources and information you provide if they can read, understand, and act on health care information – which means having a high level of health literacy.

Here are some key facts about health literacy, why health literacy is important, things that clinicians and office staff can do to promote health literacy in their practices, and helpful resources and additional information on health literacy. We encourage you to share this information with both clinicians and office staff in your practices.

Did You Know…?

According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL):1

  • Only 12 percent of U.S. adults had proficient health literacy.
  • Over a third of U.S. adults would have difficulty with common health tasks, such as following directions on a prescription drug label or adhering to a childhood immunization schedule using a standard chart.
  • Limited health literacy affects adults in all racial and ethnic groups.
  • Even high school and college graduates can have limited health literacy.
  • Compared to privately insured adults, both publicly insured and uninsured adults had lower health literacy skills.
  • All adults, regardless of their health literacy skills, were more likely to get health information from radio/television, friends/family, and health professionals than from print media.

Why Health Literacy Is Important

What You Can Do

Many tools, techniques and resources are available to doctors, nurses, and office staff to ensure that communication between the health care provider and the patient is as effective as possible.

Tips for Clinicians

  • Encourage your patients to ask questions about their treatment , and ask patients if they have any questions about their treatment, especially:
    • What the nature of their problem is
    • What patients need to do about the problem
    • Why it’s important to do what they need to do5
  • Use the "teach-back" technique : Ask patients to explain or demonstrate how they will undertake a recommended treatment or intervention6
  • Recognize signs that patients may be having health literacy issues , such as lack of follow-through on instructions7
  • Connect patients to reliable, credible resources of health information, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)’s health information pages.

Tips for Office Staff

  • Ask patients if they understand their providers’ instructions before they leave the office, and understand their next steps.
  • Make sure patients have access to educational resources in your office, such as in your waiting room and treatment rooms.
  • For patients whose primary language is not English , provide access to translation services and patient materials in languages commonly spoken in your practice.
  • If patients are, for example, cancelling or missing appointments, or failing to fill prescriptions, follow up to see if patients understand the providers’ instructions.

Helpful Resources

Other helpful resources include:

Review these resources and share them with others in your practice to learn more about how you can make your practice more health literacy-friendly.


Sources

 

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