Ever gone to the doctor and found yourself wondering just what she was telling you?
Ever been given instructions on how to take care of yourself after you left the hospital and not understood what they meant? Ever got one of those lovely long sheets about your new prescription’s side effects from the pharmacist and ignored it?
This can mean a big problem for your health. But you’re not alone.
Doctors and other health professionals can often use too much jargon and make assumptions about their patients’ level of health literacy. A recent article in the American Family Physician reports that “… more than one-third of U.S. adults have limited health literacy, which contributes to poor health outcomes and affects patient safety, and health care access and quality”.
In fact, this number may be low. In Canada, closer to half of adults have low health literacy levels. According to the Institute of Medicine in Washington D.C., “Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services.”
Being health literate depends to some extent on having basic literacy in the first place. It’s not about whether you can read or not – it’s about how well you read, and how much you can understand. For some people just simply decoding the words is all they can manage. Others can read so well, they can read between the lines. The more basic literacy you have, the better chance you have of being health literate.
But it doesn’t stop there. Health information can be difficult stuff for most of us to digest. Partly because medical language is not something we use every day.
The American Family Physician article goes on to suggest that health professionals reduce the amount of jargon and other complex language they use when they are talking to patients or developing written materials. That makes sense. Using plain language makes the message much easier to hear and absorb. It’s also easier to read and understand. Using pictures and graphs helps. Breaking down instructions into small concrete steps is important.
The truth is, we all benefit from the use of plain language. It’s just really important – sometimes life and death important – when the subject is our health.
We should remember too that trauma does nasty things to a person’s brain. Talking to a doctor can be traumatic. When you’re talking about your health, anything after “cancer” or “50 per cent chance” or “operate” may simply not be heard.
So, we should all keep on practicing those reading and communication skills we learned when we were younger. If we don’t, we tend to lose them as we age – just when we’re getting to the time when we may start hearing difficult news from our doctors.
And our doctors (and other health professionals) need to remember that what’s simply cervicalgia to them is a really big pain in the neck to us.
—By Janet Lane, Director of the Centre for Human Capital Policy