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Health Literacy: The Missing Piece We Didn’t Know Was Missing
By Andrew Eaves
New Haven, Connecticut
The first time I even heard the term health literacy was about 3 years ago at a Chamber of Commerce event in Connecticut. It was there that one of our former board members introduced me to Helen Osborne, a well-regarded expert in the field, and the moderator of a panel discussion to take place about this important topic. My curiosity was piqued, so a colleague and I attended the presentation.
What struck me most was the presence of representatives from a variety of health care settings – hospitals, clinics, medical practices, insurance companies, among others – and how each one of them was extremely engaged in the conversation. I witnessed whole-hearted agreement among this diverse group on the impacts of low health literacy on their patients' ability to fully understand and act upon information provided to them. It was amazing to me that even though the clinical settings represented in this panel discussion were so diverse, a clear consensus that this was something we absolutely needed to address was apparent.
Witnessing this, I grew confident that health literacy was an issue that could serve to unite the various players in our regional health care continuum. We quickly planned a "Health Literacy Conference" to be held at the Visiting Nurse Association of South Central Connecticut annual meeting, and succeeded in bringing together about 75 health care representatives from our region.
And I’m happy to report that that was just the beginning. We incorporated addressing health illiteracy into our menu of community outreach activities that we conduct as part of our non-profit mission. We have also been fortunate to receive grant funding from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven to support these efforts and have found willing audiences, supportive collaborators and a growing database of research from which to draw. Our goal is to help our communities’ residents become better health care consumers and more active participants in their own care, and ultimately to reduce unnecessary use of health care resources that stems from unclear communication between patients and their doctors.
We also began to review our own protocols to determine if we’ve been unknowingly creating obstacles to health literacy. We chose to start with our admission booklet – we had been told anecdotally by a nurse she did not think people read it – and sought to determine why that was. Our nurses are taking a second and hard look at material they have been using for patient teaching plans. We have tackled our HIPAA form, the document informing people of their rights regarding the confidentiality of their health information, which we determined could not be read by 60% of our patient base! We’ve found that once you look at something which succeeds in creating plain, clear and concise health communication, you see everything else as it really is: cumbersome, hard to understand, overwhelming, contradictory, and more.
The biggest lesson we’ve learned is this: Community and home health care is all about teaching. Our product is a patient with the willingness and ability to gain the knowledge they need to take care of themselves right here and right now. The Visiting Nurse Association of South Central Connecticut is proud of what we have been able to accomplish and looks forward to doing what still needs to be done.
Andrew Eaves is Vice President for Marketing & Development at the Visiting Nurse Association of South Central CT. To learn more, go to www.vnascc.org.
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