Submitted by Edith Starbuck, Health Sciences Library, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
Shelley Paden, College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services,
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
The growing awareness of disparities in health literacy and multicultural competency led us to focus on helping physicians and health professionals better serve patients with diverse needs. Creating a website seemed to be a good way to educate busy health professionals. We started collecting information for the website in these topic areas:
- Examples of low health literacy and culturally diverse patients
- Strategies to use to help patients understand and manage their health conditions
- Continuing education opportunities for physicians and other health professionals
- Patient handouts
- Health literacy and cultural competency organizations
- University resources including books and journals
- Research, including links to PubMed that run current searches on health literacy or cultural competency
- Statistics that show why it is important to help patients with low health literacy and patients from diverse cultural backgrounds
Designing the website proved to be more challenging than finding useful content. Our goal was to make it attractive and easy for busy health professionals to use. The Health Center Publicity Department had several useful design suggestions including:
- Keep pages short and to the point.
- On the home page include statistics, how to identify low literacy patients and tips on how to communicate with those patients.
- Under each category on the website, start with links to top picks. If the user wants to go into more depth, they can click on another level and get more in-depth information.
Using these design suggestions, we developed the website and then discussed ways to roll it out. Some of our ideas included:
- Linking to the health literacy website from the library website
- Announcing it by email and as a news item on the library website
- Offering classes on health literacy that introduced the website in the library or as a "road show" presentation available to Academic Health Center students, residents and faculty
- Partnering with the Center for Competency Development and Assessment (CCDA) in their work with medical students in developing the essential skills of the medical interview, physical examination and diagnosis
- Introducing it as part of other classes we teach in the library like PubMed, CINAHL and other databases
We presented our website poster to librarians at the National Diversity in Libraries Conference and the Midwest Chapter/MLA Annual Meeting. The poster sessions provided a great opportunity to get input and fresh ideas. From the responses we received at these conferences, it was clear that health literacy and cultural competency is an important and pertinent topic.
Some attendees recommended we start by educating nursing and/or allied health students and professionals. We are now prepared to update the website and find partners at the University of Cincinnati for a rollout.