All Entries Tagged With: "health literacy"
Patient safety in 140 characters
In honor of patient safety week, the National Patient Safety Foundation hosted a tweet chat, in which participants all follow the same hashtag (#keyword) to have a large conversation. If you missed it, you can read the conversation by searching twitter for “#PSAW2012.” I suggest checking it out (you don’t even have to have Twitter to conduct a search) for the resourceful links alone. Comment below or tweet @PSeditor if you joined and what you liked about it.
Here are some of the topics and facts brought up in conversation:
- Health literacy:
Twelve percent of adults have good health literacy
E-literature might help follow up with patients post-visit
MDs tend to interrupt patients after 18 seconds of speaking
- PSAW:
Getting PSAW recognized by more of the general public to spread awareness beyond the healthcare setting
Why PSAW is observed, recognized, but not celebrated
Next PSAW is March 3 –9, 2013!
Here are some resources brought up in conversation:
NSPF’s new “Ask Me” video
AHRQ’s “Questions are the Answer” video
IMSP has new tools and resources
Health Literacy: Reducing the Burden of a Complex Healthcare System
Patient Safety Week 2012: Informing the Journey, Not Changing the Destination
Checklists that patients and doctors follow can improve hospital care
Dreaming the dream (by Peter Provonost)
Navigating the Health Care System: Advice Columns from Dr. Carolyn Clancy
Do Electronic Medical Records Save Money?
What’s in a Name? Safer care, for one.
20 Tips to Help Prevent Medical Errors: Patient Fact Sheet
ED interpreters improve satisfaction
Patients in the ED are often distressed and on edge. It’s well noted that communicating with the patient, whether that means telling them the expected wait time or giving explicit discharge directions, is one of the best ways to increase patient satisfaction. But when the patient does not speak fluent English, good communication can be harder to come by.
A new study shows just how important that communication is by surveying patients who received professional on-site interpreters in the emergency department. Out of these 242 patients, 96% were “very satisfied” with their ability to communicate during the ER visit, compared to 24% in the control group. The study, Examining Effectiveness of Medical Interpreters in Emergency Departments for Spanish-Speaking Patients with Limited English Proficiency: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial, also showed that clinicians who worked with the patients with professional on-site interpreters were on average more satisfied.
AHRQ releases Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has released a new health literacy toolkit with the help of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The toolkit was designed for staff members at varying levels to use. It includes:
- A Quick Start Guide
- The Path to Improvement, which outlines the six steps to fully implement the toolkit
- Twenty short tools to identify and address areas that need improvement
- Links to Internet resources
- An appendix with resources to support implementation, such as sample forms, posters, PowerPoint presentations, and worksheets
To find the entire toolkit, click here. If you are looking for more information about the toolkit, visit the NC Program on Health Literacy’s Web site.
The topic of health literacy is one to which the AHRQ and other organizations have been paying increased attention lately. The Joint Commission recently announced it will be including communication, language, and culture standards in its 2011 standards, although hospitals will not be required to comply with them until 2012 at the earliest. In addition, The Joint Commission will be launching a downloadable road map in May for facilities to help them assess and transform their own health literacy programs.
Do you think your facility will benefit from any of these newly and soon to be released tools? Is health literacy something that you think about with every patient encounter?
Joint Commission and HHS publish new video to improve patient-provider communication, reduce disparities in care
The Joint Commission and Health and Human Services released yesterday a 30-minute series of videos titled Improving Patient-Provider Communication: Joint Commission Standards and Federal Laws. The videos, which can be found on YouTube, were created out of recognition that there are a lack of resources out there that touch on methods for improving communication between patients and their providers for non English speaking patients, and patients who are hard of hearing. Additionally, the are many current regulations surrounding those topics, and The Joint Commission is developing a set of standards surrounding cultural competence, patient-centered care, and effective communication.
The project runs through January 2010. It will attempt to address how better to incorporate health literacy, culture, and diversity into Joint Commission standards. You can read more about the project here.
AHRQ adds health literacy questions to CAHPS data set
The Agency for Research and Healthcare Quality (AHRQ) has released a set of 29 questions to be added to the CAHPS (Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Clinician and Group Survey that address health literacy. The set of questions was created in conjunction with Healthy People 2010, a national health promotion and disease prevention initiative. The questions touch on the following topics:
- Communication with doctors
- Communication about health problems and concerns
- Communication about medicines
- Communication about tests
- Communication about forms
- Disease self-management
Research shows that only 12% of adults are fully health literate. The AHRQ’s definition of health literacy is “patients’ ability to obtain, process, and understand the basic health information and services they need to make appropriate health decisions.” In recent years there’s been a greater push to make it the part of the physician’s and clinical team’s responsibility to educate patients about their health issues. The questions were designed as an assessment tool to help clinicians measure if their efforts are paying off and patients are in fact becoming more health literate, and it was also designed to be a quality improvement tool.
To find the set of health literacy CAHPS questions, and more about them, click here. Do you think your facility would add these health literacy questions to its existing set of CAHPS questions?
October celebrates Health Literacy Month, National Healthcare Quality Week
The month of October brings us two health-related events to celebrate: Health Literacy Month and National Healthcare Quality Week (October 18-24). Both events give healthcare workers and their organizations a chance to think about current practices and how to improve in the name of patient safety.
Health Literacy Month, which was started by Helen Osborne, MEd, OTR/L, a health literacy consultant, in 1999. This year’s theme is “Why Health Literacy Matters: Sharing Our Stories in Words, Pictures, and Sound” and is accompanied by an informative Web site (www.healthliteracymonth.org). Each day during the month of October a new health literacy “story” is added to the “stories section of the Web site. One of these highlights a couple of songs sung by Mache Seibel, MD, in honor of the month. You can find more of his songs at the Web site www.healthrock.com. Additionally, the Health Literacy site provides different resources and materials for the month.
National Healthcare Quality Week (NHQW) is being observed next week and the National Association for Healthcare Quality’s (NAHQ) Web sitecontains news about continuing education opportunities and events in honor of the week. The time is meant to highlight those healthcare workers whose quality work influences patient outcomes for the better. It also provides suggestions for ways that healthcare facilities can promote and publicize NHQW or any NHQW-related events being put on in the organization or larger community.
Are any of your facilities observing Health Literacy Month or National Healthcare Quality Week? What has your hospital done?
Patients’ Bill of Rights found to be difficult for patients to understand
Found this story via KevinMD, and it caught my eye because I know how hard hospitals, and patient education managers in particular, work to make sure their own patient safety and education literature is written at an 8th grade level. Turns out the Patients’ Bill of Rights (this is the American Hospital Association’s (AHA) original version), of which many states have modified and made their own versions, is tough to read for many patients. This HealthDay article points out some examples of how some of the rights listed could be modified to be written in a manner that most patients would understand (at an 8th grade reading level).
The report, which was based off of a study published in the Journal of Internal General Medicine, shows that there is great variability among state versions of the Patient Bill of Rights, and that most did not take into account the average reading level in the U.S. Additionally, most were only written in English and didn’t cover the 12 themes originally listed in the AHA’s Bill of Rights. Part of the problem is that there is no Federal Patients’ Bill of Rights, making it difficult to standardize what should be included and how one should be written. The AHA published “The Patient Care Partnership” in 2006 to replace their Bill of Rights to address what should be part of the information exchange during a patient’s hospital stay.
Has your hospital made sure its Patients’ Bill of Rights is understandable by all patients?
