Training Family Medicine Residents in Effective Communication Skills While Utilizing Promotoras as Standardized Patients in OSCEs: A Health Literacy Curriculum

Abstract

Introduction. Future health care providers need to be trained in the knowledge and skills to effectively communicate with their patients with limited health literacy. The purpose of this study is to develop and evaluate a curriculum designed to increase residents' health literacy knowledge, improve communication skills, and work with an interpreter. Materials and Methods. Family Medicine residents (N = 25) participated in a health literacy training which included didactic lectures and an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE). Community promotoras acted as standardized patients and evaluated the residents' ability to measure their patients' health literacy, communicate effectively using the teach-back and Ask Me 3 methods, and appropriately use an interpreter. Pre- and postknowledge, attitudes, and postdidactic feedback were obtained. We compared OSCE scores from the group that received training (didactic group) and previous graduates. Residents reported the skills they used in practice three months later. Results. Family Medicine residents showed an increase in health literacy knowledge (p = 0.001) and scored in the adequately to expertly performed range in the OSCE. Residents reported using the teach-back method (77.8%) and a translator more effectively (77.8%) three months later. Conclusions. Our innovative health literacy OSCE can be replicated for medical learners at all levels of training.

Positive Outcomes of a Comprehensive Health Literacy Communication Training for Health Professionals in Three European Countries: A Multi-centre Pre-post Intervention Study

“…We measured health literacy competencies with a self-rated questionnaire (See Supplementary Materials for the three questionnaires). We selected the relevant subscales from questionnaires which were used in previous studies on health literacy training interventions for (future) professionals, or derived from frameworks of communication strategies, as far as no suitable questionnaires were available which matched with the contents of our training [29,30,31,32,33,34].…”

Effectiveness of a Comprehensive Health Literacy Consultation Skills Training for Undergraduate Medical Students: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…We used a self-rated questionnaire to measure health literacy competency (See Supplementary Materials S1 for the questionnaire). The subscales of the questionnaire were selected from research on health literacy education and capacity building [27][28][29][30][31][32]. In case there were no suitable instruments subscales available to measure the required outcomes, the subscales were based on theoretical models on patient-centred communication [27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

Validation of the instrument of health literacy competencies for Chinese-speaking health professionals

“…The number of items in existing instruments measuring health literacy knowledge for health professionals ranges from 6 to 29; these items pertain to health literacy knowledge in general, and specifically to disadvantageous factors for vulnerable populations, prevalence of LHL, and consequences for various countries [ 27 – 28 ]. As knowledge and skills were measured in different domains, we adopted Rasch analysis, which entailed examining the adequacy of the 27 items in the knowledge domain, based on difficulty and item goodness-of-fit statistics ( p > .05).…”