Improving Health Equity Through Health Literacy Education

Abstract

Health literacy is the ability to understand and use health information. More than one-third of adults living in the United States have limited health literacy, which is associated with adverse health outcomes. Physicians need education about how to communicate effectively across the range of health literacy levels, but residency programs often fail to provide it. We aimed to develop and evaluate a curriculum to establish evidence-based recommendations for training family medicine resident physicians to communicate effectively across the range of health literacy levels. We developed and implemented a 6-month curriculum about health literacy and best practices for communication and collected three pre-/post-measures: patient surveys, videos of residents' patient encounters, and resident self-surveys of knowledge, attitudes, and use of communication techniques. Training of 39 residents included conferences, videotape reviews, written feedback, targeted supervision, and environmental cues. All knowledge/attitude questions on the resident survey improved significantly, as did the use of 4 of 6 communication techniques. Video observation also showed significant improvement in the residents' use of three techniques and a decrease in jargon use and an increase in “plain language” explanations of terms. Multimodal interventions improved residents' knowledge and attitudes about health literacy and use of health literacy precautions. [ HLRP: Health Literacy Research and Practice . 2023;7(2):e99–e104. ]

Utilizing the Newest Vital Sign (NVS) to Assess Health Literacy at a Regional Academic Medical Center's Family Medicine Clinic

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Health Literacy Training Critical for Medical Residency Transformation in the United Arab Emirates

“…The recent publication of the article, “Improving Health Equity Through Health Literacy Education,” ( Nepps et al, 2023 ) advances the health literacy mission in a bold and balanced manner. Inadequate health literacy is known to be a stronger predictor of poor health outcomes than all other sociodemographic variables, including ethnicity ( Levic et al, 2023 ).…”

Understanding social determinants of health and physical therapy outcomes in patients with low back pain: A scoping review

“…More focused research on SDOH that impacts health literacy such as educational attainment, SES and race (Social Determinants of Health, 2021) may provide a better understanding of patient outcomes and allow therapists to tailor care to account for those barriers. Furthermore, understanding factors affecting health literacy may direct efforts to improve awareness of PT as a treatment for LBP and mitigate health inequities(Nepps et al, 2023). Finally, most studies evaluated the effect of an individual SDOH on LBP outcomes; however, patients may present with multiple SDOH clinically.…”