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      Prioritized Health Literacy and Clear Communication Practices For Health Care Professionals

      research-article
      , MD, MPH, , MA, , MD
      Health Literacy Research and Practice
      SLACK Incorporated

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          Abstract

          Background:

          Health care professionals need more and better training about health literacy and clear communication to provide optimal care to populations with low health literacy. A large number of health literacy and clear communication practices have been identified in the literature, but health professions educators, administrators, and policymakers have lacked guidance regarding which practices should be prioritized among members of the health care workforce.

          Objective:

          This study sought to prioritize recommended health literacy and clear communication practices for health care professionals.

          Methods:

          A Q-sort consensus method was used among 25 health literacy experts to rank a previously identified list of 32 health literacy and clear communication practices for health care professionals. Mean ratings for each of the 32 practices were compared using t-tests.

          Key Results:

          Mean ratings for the 32 practices fell along a spectrum from higher to lower importance. The eight top-rated practices formed a cluster, and seven of these items demonstrated clear consensus, whereas one item may have been influenced by one or more outlier rankings.

          Conclusions:

          Although a large number of health literacy and clear communication practices have been recommended in the literature for health care professionals, this is the first known study to rank such practices in terms of importance. The top-rated items can be considered a core set of practices that all health care professionals should learn and routinely use in clinical settings. These consensus opinion results will help health professions educators, administrators, and policymakers to direct potentially limited resources toward improving training in patient-centered communication, and when designing curricula, practice standards, care delivery models, and policies for health care professionals and systems to improve patient outcomes. Future studies should empirically confirm the relative value of the ranked items in terms of patient-centered outcomes. [ Health Literacy Research and Practice. 2017;1(3):e90–e99.]

          Plain Language Summary:

          This is the first study to rank the most important things that health care workers can do to communicate more clearly with patients. A group of 25 experts ranked 32 items in order of importance. The list can be used to improve training for health care workers.

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          Most cited references22

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          Closing the Loop

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            Health Literacy Practices and Educational Competencies for Health Professionals: A Consensus Study

            Health care professionals often lack adequate knowledge about health literacy and the skills needed to address low health literacy among patients and their caregivers. Many promising practices for mitigating the effects of low health literacy are not used consistently. Improving health literacy training for health care professionals has received increasing emphasis in recent years. The development and evaluation of curricula for health professionals has been limited by the lack of agreed-upon educational competencies in this area. This study aimed to identify a set of health literacy educational competencies and target behaviors, or practices, relevant to the training of all health care professionals. The authors conducted a thorough literature review to identify a comprehensive list of potential health literacy competencies and practices, which they categorized into 1 or more educational domains (i.e., knowledge, skills, attitudes) or a practice domain. The authors stated each item in operationalized language following Bloom's Taxonomy. The authors then used a modified Delphi method to identify consensus among a group of 23 health professions education experts representing 11 fields in the health professions. Participants rated their level of agreement as to whether a competency or practice was both appropriate and important for all health professions students. A predetermined threshold of 70% agreement was used to define consensus. After 4 rounds of ratings and modifications, consensus agreement was reached on 62 out of 64 potential educational competencies (24 knowledge items, 27 skill items, and 11 attitude items), and 32 out of 33 potential practices. This study is the first known attempt to develop consensus on a list of health literacy practices and to translate recommended health literacy practices into an agreed-upon set of measurable educational competencies for health professionals. Further work is needed to prioritize the competencies and practices in terms of relative importance.
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              Relationship, communication, and efficiency in the medical encounter: creating a clinical model from a literature review.

              While there is consensus about the value of communication skills, many physicians complain that there is not enough time to use these skills. Little is known about how to combine effective relationship development and communication skills with time management to maximize efficiency. Our objective was to examine what physician-patient relationship and communication skills enhance efficiency. We conducted searches of PubMed, EMBASE, and PsychINFO for the date range January 1973 to October 2006. We reviewed the reference lists of identified publications and the bibliographies of experts in physician-patient communication for additional publications. From our initial group of citations (n = 1146), we included only studies written in English that reported original data on the use of communication or relationship skills and their effect on time use or visit length. Study inclusion was determined by independent review by 2 authors (L.B.M. and D.C.D.). This yielded 9 publications for our analysis. The 2 reviewers independently read and classified the 9 publications and cataloged them by type of study, results, and limitations. Differences were resolved by consensus. Three domains emerged that may enhance communication efficiency: rapport building, up-front agenda setting, and acknowledging social or emotional clues. Building on these findings, we offer a model blending the quality-enhancing and time management features of selected communication and relationship skills. There is a need for additional research about communication skills that enhance quality and efficiency.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Health Lit Res Pract
                Health Lit Res Pract
                HLRP
                Health Literacy Research and Practice
                SLACK Incorporated (Thorofare, NJ )
                2475-6024
                2474-8307
                July 2017
                10 July 2017
                : 1
                : 3
                : e91-e99
                Author notes

                Cliff Coleman, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor, Department of Family Medicine, and the Clinical Thread Director for Professionalism, Ethics, and Communication,School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University. Stan Hudson, MA, is the Associate Director, Center for Health Policy, University of Missouri. Ben Pederson, MD, is a Resident Physician, Department of Family Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University.

                Address correspondence to Cliff Coleman, MD, MPH, Department of Family Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, 3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road, Portland, OR 97239; email: colemanc@ 123456ohsu.edu .

                These data were presented as a poster at the 15th Annual Institute for Healthcare Advancement Health Literacy Conference, Anaheim, CA, May 5, 2016; and at the 7th Annual Health Literacy Research Conference, Bethesda, MD, November 2, 2015.

                Disclosure: The authors have no relevant financial relationships to disclose.

                Article
                10.3928_24748307-20170503-01
                10.3928/24748307-20170503-01
                6607795
                31294254
                c1bc284a-748f-434d-90f2-cf23e7404698
                © 2017 Coleman, Hudson, Pederson

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0). This license allows users to copy and distribute, to remix, transform, and build upon the article non-commercially, provided the author is attributed and the new work is non-commercial.

                History
                : 07 January 2017
                : 02 May 2017
                Categories
                Original Research

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