Course: Working with Patients with Limited Health Literacy

Patients often come out of consultations with healthcare professionals, not knowing exactly what it is they should do. We know from research that half of what a person is told …

Understanding the extent and pattern of peoples’ level of health literacy across populations is important, so that we can better devise interventions to address the problem. It also provides a …

The course was developed by the international IMPACCT consortium, including University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, National University of Ireland Galway, Jacobs University, Regione Marche, Eurepean Association of Institutions …

Watch the following video of two healthcare professionals, who were interviewed on how they empower their patients using the techniques proposed to make health-related information more easily-understandable. After seeing the …

We have considered the problem of health literacy from the patient’s perspective as experienced through accessing, understanding, appraising and applying health information and how this manifests as a problem for …

Empowerment is important in relation to health literacy as seen in its inclusion in definitions (e.g. WHO) and from the patients perspective. Watch what Mrs Tilsey has to say in …

In the previous steps you have seen examples of healthcare forms and what makes these easy or difficult to use. Easy to understand forms usually don’t contain a lot of …

According to the systematic review by Jager et al. (2019), patients with limited health literacy would benefit from more easily-understandable materials on how to manage their disease or lifestyle as …

“The perceived need for patients to acquire more knowledge about their condition might influence the extent to which patients actively seek knowledge themselves.” – A statement in relation to knowledge …

In this video, we explore how patients want to take part in the decision making related to their treatment. We will meet Bob. Bob is a 67-year-old man, who worked …

This is the first week of the course and provides the context of health literacy for the following weeks. This is important, as there are many definitions of what health …

The patient in the previous step was showing understanding, but not demonstrating understanding. This means that the doctor cannot be sure that her patient actually understood everything she explained. If …

As we saw in Week 1 health professionals have expectations of patients’ abilities. However, patients also have expectations about accessing and using health services. In this video people from the …

In the previous steps we have explored patient responses and how these can be signals of limited understanding and limited health literacy. Now we will consider how healthcare professionals can …

If you remember from Week 1, we learned about health literacy through its definition, which includes the following statement: […] By improving people’s access to health information and their capacity …