It just so happens that October is Health Literacy Month. It was founded in 1999 by Helen Osborne, an occupational therapist and health literacy expert. The main idea is that health information should be communicated in clear language. How she started it is quite a story.
She first learned about health literacy from reading a research paper published in 1995 by Dr. Mark V. Williams. People find it difficult to understand written health information. She saw a lot of that on the psychiatric unit where she was working at the time as an occupational therapist.
That caught my interest because I always found occupational therapists to be very helpful for patient care everywhere in the hospital, not only on psychiatric unit.
It was common for internists and surgeons to call me after a patient on the general medical wards were evaluated by an OT specialist who typically administered an assessment to facilitate discharge planning.
The OT consultant often performed what is called an Allen Cognitive Level Screen to help home caregivers plan for how to help patients who may have cognitive impairment and who are to be discharged from the hospital.
Often, they had neurocognitive impairments (often from delirium and/or dementia) that led to consultation with psychiatry about discharge planning after the OT assessment uncovered significant cognitive issues that might require supervision at home.
Clear communication is vital in those and other situations in which health care professionals provide care for patients.
Many of those patients are elderly and I’m in that group. This reminds me that I’m scheduled to see a primary care provider. I made the appointment this past March, and I still have 6 more months to wait. I’m on a wait list to get in sooner, but I think the wait list might be broken.
I don’t need emergency or urgent care or Artificial Intelligence. I just have a few questions. Communication is pretty difficult in a health care system without enough providers.
I’m actually pretty healthy. I exercise daily, juggle, and occasionally even win a cribbage game with my wife, Sena. I have also managed to lose weight in the last 6 months because Sena has modified our diet. I take a multivitamin a day and no other medications. I can still leap tall buildings in a single bound, but I’m not quite as fast as a locomotive. I’m pretty lucky.
I think I can wait for my first primary care visit in several years. There might not be that much to talk about, so clear communication might not be that tough:
Doctor: So, how are you doing?
Me: Pretty good.
Doctor: Great! See you in 5 years!
Leave a Reply