The Importance of Health Literacy

How often do we as nurses rattle off medical jargon to our patients who, simply put, don’t speak the language? How many times have we instructed a patient to take a medication twice a day with no explanation of exactly what that means? If the patient decides that twice a day is 7 a.m. and 11 a.m., is he wrong? No, he isn’t. That is twice a day—but likely not the optimum times to take his medication. We need to be speaking to our patients in specific terms. Specific and simple.

Having spent many years working with the medically indigent, the necessity for health care providers to speak in clear, simple and specific terms that can be understood by the majority of adults is a soap box issue for me. You’ll be hearing more from me on the subject. There are just too many facets of health literacy to address in one short rant.

I don’t think the majority of us throw around medical terms to show off our big vocabularies. More likely, we have become so accustomed to “med speak” that we don’t even realize we’re speaking what sounds like a foreign tongue to our patients. I am here to promote Plain Speak.

Even though I thought I was using Plain Speak, it seemed to take forever to get across to my husband the fact that the largest spoon in the silverware drawer was not an accurate measure of a one-tablespoon dose of cough syrup. If a man with a college degree, a vice president of a large corporation, whose grandmother, sister and wife are RNs has trouble (or a resistance to) absorbing that concept, obviously our more vulnerable population requires individual, specific and simple instruction.

Educating a patient to correctly take his medication is merely the tip of the iceberg. Health literacy, or the lack of it, encompasses the broad spectrum of all things medical. I mention medication because it is a simple-to-understand example and we have to start somewhere. It’s a baby step. I urge all nurses to take a baby step, start where you are and challenge yourself to speak to your patients about their health in clear and simple words they can understand.

A 2003 study determined that 90 million adults in the U.S.—almost half—lack the skills to use our health system effectively. Attaining comprehensive health literacy is enormously important to the wellbeing of our populace and to relieving the stress on our health care system, financially and institutionally. Take your first baby step today.