Test Your Knowledge of Health Reform

Who's read the full Affordable Care Act? … That’s what I thought.

We’ve now got a Public Health Intern at the Coalition, so we’re looking forward to getting his expertise in this area out to the community! Until then, here’s a 10-question quiz to assess your understanding of recent health care legislation. The tool even ranks your performance against the rest of the nation! Come on… You know you’re curious!

What was your score? Were you surprised? Let us know!

Though It May Be Too Early to Start Shopping for a Halloween Costume...

It's never too early for LCCT to start gearing up for October's National Health Literacy Month! You might be thinking, "do they realize that October is almost five months away?" The answer is yes, but don't worry. We do have a reason! We've got big plans for Health Literacy Month and want to get everyone involved, so we're loading up the bandwagon starting now! That means there's no better time than the present for you to tell us about what you’ve been doing, or what you’d like to do to improve communication between Central Texas patients and their healthcare providers.

Your efforts are making a difference in our community, so don’t let them go unrecognized. No effort is too small! Tell us what you're up to and let us promote your commitment to improved health communication during National Health Literacy Month!

Here’s what we need to know: What are you doing to combat low health literacy? What projects or discussions has your organization started to address the problem in our community? Do you want to join the health literacy movement, but don’t know how to get started?

Comment and tell us about it! Let's put our heads together to make this Health Literacy the biggest Central Texas has ever seen!

30 Seconds in the Life of a Low Health Literate Individual

1) What has your physician recommended for you?
2) What does this procedure involve?
3) How are you going to prepare for the procedure?


Now, think about how that felt? Did it take you a second to figure out what you were reading? Did you have to look back at the short paragraph in order to answer the questions at the end? If you struggled with this exercise, maybe you will be able to better empathize with the the 90 million low health-literate Americans who face frustrations such as this on a daily basis. The average medical form, whether it be a pamphlet on how to eat nutritiously or a patient consent form, is written at the 10th grade level. The average American is reading at the 8th grade level. Herein lies one of the major problems in our healthcare system.

What can you do? If you're an adult ed instructor, incorporate health-related information into your lesson plans. Don't know how? No problem, we provide half-day workshops on how to teach health literacy in the adult ed classroom! If you're a healthcare provider or advocate, talk to your supervisors about the patient-friendliness of the materials that you provide your clients. Also, think about the care you provide low health literate clients...are they REALLY understanding everything you tell them? We provide trainings on patient-provider communication in order to improve patient-compliance. Together we can begin to increase the health literacy of our community.

The gift of health literacy!

A few weeks ago, a program called Austin GiveCamp offered the Coalition a belated Christmas gift. In cities across the nation, the Camp brings together area web developers and designers to do pro bono work for nonprofits over a weekend. They came to us at exactly the right time, because some pretty big plans were brewing over in the Health Literacy Department.

Next week, the Coalition will be launching its new and greatly improved Health Literacy webpage, fully equipped with a searchable library of every health literacy resource we know about. You'll be able to go to our page and search resources based on your perspective as an adult educator, healthcare provider, or patient. The page will be premiered at the Literacy Coalition's Annual Meeting for our network providers on February 16th. Have your clicking fingers ready, because overlooking health literacy just got a whole lot harder!

A Health Literacy Coordinator's Stay at the Hospital

I spent most of last week in "one of the top 100 hospitals in America" at the bedside of my girlfriend who was in for a cholecystectomy. A WHAT??? Oh, sorry. She had her gall bladder removed.

"Cholecystectomy," that's a new word I learned last week, along with about 25 others such as intravenous, intraoperative, supine, phenergran, and on and on. Being that I have spent more hours in the past year researching and working with health literacy than sleeping, I felt well prepared and empowered as my gf's patient advocate. We made a list of questions upon checking into the hospital and continually added to it over the next 4 days. We were relentless in our question asking; getting opinions from everyone from the surgeon to the cleaning lady.

At one point we actually made a nurse feel quite uncomfortable as she was struggling to explain the anti-nausea medicine, phenergran, to her drowsy, scared patient. I was persistent in my repetition of, "Wait, what does that mean?" and "Sclerosed veins? I don't understand, can you tell us what the side effects are in Laymen's terms?" At all of my pestering, the nurse dejectedly admitted, "I'm not a very good teacher. I know what I'm doing but I've never been a good teacher."

The hospital at which we stayed has the mission to "strive to provide exceptional care to every patient every day with a spirit of warmth, friendliness and personal pride." I believe them. Although striving to provide this exceptional, patient-centered care, and regardless of their ranking as a top 100 hospital, my girlfriend and I saw HUGE room for improvement. I hope I see those direct-care staff again someday and I hope that when that time comes, that they are sitting in on one of the Literacy Coalition's Health Literacy Trainings. I'm proud to provide a product that drastically improves patient-provider communication and patient-care, even at a top 100 hospital.

Because everyone needs a little help when it comes to healthcare

So, I just finished my second month as Health Literacy Specialist VISTA at the Literacy Coalition! I already take pleasure in looking back and assessing all I've learned about literacy in the healthcare setting over just a couple of months. One of the biggest surprises so far has been finding out that even I underestimated the health resources available to me before my days at The Coalition. My wake-up call came in the form of my first beast of an undertaking with the LCCT: the 2011 Healthcare Resource Directory.

As mundane as updating hundreds of addresses and phone numbers may be, the reward at the end of it all is pretty substantial. For those of you who have never used our directory, it can be best described as a consolidation of information on all of the low-cost clinics, hospitals, specialty health services, and healthcare benefits programs available to Central Texans and their families. It’s designed to be used by professionals in healthcare, social services, adult education… whoever has access to populations at risk for low health literacy. Those professionals are in a prime spot to be valuable resources to patients through personal referrals. The new and improved 3rd edition of The Directory will contain all of the helpful information the 2nd did last year, with the addition of a new chapter dedicated to healthcare navigation and patient resources. This chapter will list services Central Texans need to fill out their health benefits applications, get to their appointments, coordinate their medications and treatments, get legal advice about their healthcare, and more. The latest edition will also include a handy index, expanded glossary, and a few other tricks to help users find the information they need, fast.

I once thought that the right motivation and total access to pretty much every imaginable piece of information every person has ever documented (A.K.A. the Internet) would be more than enough to equip me for making simple health decisions. Turns out... Not so much. Having access to everything doesn’t always mean finding what you need. With The Directory, we try to fill that gap between information access and actual comprehension. We do all the sifting and sorting so that you can skip a few headaches and help more people. Cool, huh?

The 2011 Healthcare Resource Directory is set to roll out in early February, so e-mail me at lobar@willread.org A.S.A.P. to reserve your organization’s copy!

I read it and all, but I don’t know what I read

October is Health Literacy Month—and even though it is nearly over, there’s still time to think about what health literacy is and why it’s important, and maybe even take some action! A quick definition: health literacy is the ability to read, understand, and act on health information. Sounds simple, right? Health literacy includes not only fundamental literacy (reading, writing, speaking and numeracy) but also scientific civic and cultural literacy. (Zarcadoolas, Pleasant, and Greer).

On one end of the spectrum, think for a minute about the challenge for someone who has limited math and reading skills having to figure out how to give the right dose of over- the-counter pain medication to her child. On the other end of the spectrum, think about someone having to make decisions about cancer treatments—and how those other literacies—scientific, civic, and cultural— come into play.

Another way to think about health literacy is to think of the difference between senders and receivers of health information. The senders are experts of various kinds—medical experts like doctors, nurses and public health professionals, or employees of pharmaceutical companies, men and women with scientific knowledge, who tend to use that knowledge frequently. Receivers, the patients, are very often infrequent, non-scientific users of medical information, though they may have many other kinds of expertise. It’s pretty clear that simply handing over the information from sender to receiver isn’t very effective. The work of health literacy is to find ways to create a framework for communication between them.

How does health literacy affect us? It’s nearly Halloween, so some scary stories are in order. Think of an elderly person with impaired eyesight and perhaps diminished cognitive skills taking medications—maybe six or seven, with multiple dosing instructions, including several different times of day and warnings for taking with or without food. Or think of the young woman who said the following:

I got pregnant with my second child trying to take the [birth control] pill. I don’t think I took them right at all. A month after I started taking them I found out I was pregnant. I had to read the instructions over and over and I still took them wrong.

Or this woman, about taking her prescription correctly: When I got this pamphlet it was a lot of words-- it is a lot. I read read here and there but I didn’t understand it. Because it uses a medical language. Much of the time, I don’t understand it. And when I read it, I read it and all, but I don’t know what I read. (translated from Spanish)

The Literacy Coalition of Central Texas stepped up to address health literacy directly through its Health Literacy Initiative. Working with both “senders” and “receivers,” LCCT has developed trainings for literacy groups offering literacy programs resources and workshops to learn how to include health literacy in their curricula. Additionally, it recently partnered up with Sage Words to distribute informational flyers for health literacy month across its network of literacy providers. Along with People’s Community Clinic it has launched a health literacy action group to collaboratively address low health literacy in Central Texas. The Literacy Coalition also offers trainings for healthcare providers on health literacy and effective patient-provider communication. To learn more about the how you can get involved with health literacy or to register for an upcoming workshop, please contact Nichole Lopez-Riley at nlopez@willread.org.

By guest contributor Kath Anderson from Sage Words