On Wednesday January 25 at 10am Pacific, 1pm EST, Rebecca Hogue and Britni Brown O’Donnell will be joined by Marie Ennis O’Connor and Vanessa Carter to discuss patient health literacy – that is, health literacy from a patient’s perspective.
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“students’ biggest initial difficulty is to stop reframing everything ill people say into a question of how some health-care worker might respond.” (Frank, 1995, Location 115) ~ The Wounded Storyteller
In the health literacy context, we see the definition of digital health literacy from the perspective of healthcare systems – “the ability to seek, find, understand, and appraise health information from electronic sources and apply the knowledge gained to addressing or solving a health problem” (Norman & Skinner, 2008, para. 6). More specifically, we see healthcare professionals/researchers defining health literacies in ways that benefit the healthcare system, rather than in ways that are needed by the patients of critical illness. In some ways, what we are seeing is healthy people defining what sick people need – what I call healthy privilege – when really, they only see or empathize with a portion of what sick people need. This was articulate rather well in a letter to patients written by an oncology nurse after she, herself, was diagnosed with cancer – Dear every cancer patient I ever took care of, I’m sorry, I didn’t get it.
In this session we will specifically talk about the health literacies that we, as patients, need to better manage (or take control of) our health.
We have written a bit about the topic in the following blog posts:
- Patient Health Literacies by Rebecca Hogue
- Empowering Patients with Education by Vanessa Carter
- Virtual Patient Communities by Marie Ennis-O’Connor
- ePatient Health Literacies by Britni Brown O’Donnell
There are still spaces available for those who would like to join the conversation directly. Also, if there is enough interest we will have a second conversation on this topic. Please email or tweet to Virtually Connecting (epatients@virtuallyconnecting.org, @vconnecting) if you are interested in joining us. This session will be live broadcast on YouTube live, and will be archived on the Virtually Connecting ePatients playlist.
Have a suggestion for conversation topics related to ePatients? Please leave a comment or email them to Rebecca Hogue (rebecca@virtuallyconnecting.org) or ePatients Virtually Connecting (epatients@virtuallyconnecting.org.
