Prioritized Health Literacy and Clear Communication Practices For Health Care Professionals

Abstract

Background: Health care professionals need more and better training about health literacy and clear communication to provide optimal care to populations with low health literacy. A large number of health literacy and clear communication practices have been identified in the literature, but health professions educators, administrators, and policymakers have lacked guidance regarding which practices should be prioritized among members of the health care workforce. Objective: This study sought to prioritize recommended health literacy and clear communication practices for health care professionals. Methods: A Q-sort consensus method was used among 25 health literacy experts to rank a previously identified list of 32 health literacy and clear communication practices for health care professionals. Mean ratings for each of the 32 practices were compared using t -tests. Key Results: Mean ratings for the 32 practices fell along a spectrum from higher to lower importance. The eight top-rated practices formed a cluster, and seven of these items demonstrated clear consensus, whereas one item may have been influenced by one or more outlier rankings. Conclusions: Although a large number of health literacy and clear communication practices have been recommended in the literature for health care professionals, this is the first known study to rank such practices in terms of importance. The top-rated items can be considered a core set of practices that all health care professionals should learn and routinely use in clinical settings. These consensus opinion results will help health professions educators, administrators, and policymakers to direct potentially limited resources toward improving training in patient-centered communication, and when designing curricula, practice standards, care delivery models, and policies for health care professionals and systems to improve patient outcomes. Future studies should empirically confirm the relative value of the ranked items in terms of patient-centered outcomes. [ Health Literacy Research and Practice . 2017;1(3):e90–e99.] Plain Language Summary: This is the first study to rank the most important things that health care workers can do to communicate more clearly with patients. A group of 25 experts ranked 32 items in order of importance. The list can be used to improve training for health care workers.

The 5Ts for Teach Back: An Operational Definition for Teach-Back Training

“…Teach Back is a health communication strategy used to confirm patient understanding in a non-shaming way. Teach Back is among the most important skills health care workers (HCWs) need for effective communication with patients (Coleman, Hudson, & Pederson, 2017). The goal for this project was to train HCWs in the use of Teach Back, using a standardized operational definition, which transforms Teach Back into a set of skills that are easy to learn, verifiable in practice, and, potentially, measurable in research.…”

Portrait de pratiques pro-littératie pour un partenariat de soins

“…Coleman, Hudson et Maine [19] définissent la compétence en littératie en santé des professionnels comme les savoirs, savoir-faire et attitudes dont les professionnels de la santé ont besoin pour mener une action efficace au regard de l'information et des services à donner à une patientèle de faible niveau de littératie. Ces compétences renvoient à de bonnes pratiques en matière de littératie en santé, qui visent entre autres à adopter une approche de précaution dans toutes les communications en santé, et ce, dans un style clair et simple [20,21].…”

“…En fait, les « bonnes pratiques » en littératie en santé recensées dans les écrits [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] peuvent être regroupées autour de quatre composantes ( Figure 1 ). Toutefois, malgré ce cadre, plusieurs questions subsistent quant à la compréhension des dimensions de la compétence en matière de littératie des professionnels ainsi qu'à la façon d'en favoriser le développement [3,19].…”

Patient‐centered communication in type 2 diabetes: The facilitating and constraining factors in clinical encounters

“…This is especially problematic for people with a lower health literacy with whom health professionals report feeling unprepared to communicate . Consequently, several experts have proposed clear communication and health literacy curricula for health professionals in the United States and Europe . Training in these competencies has shown the potential to improve communication skills in the short term, but it has been suggested that training would have to be ongoing, as improvements were not sustained …”