Issues, Advances, and Successes, Essay Example

When I was younger I caught a bad case of pertussis (whooping cough) and ended up having to go to the hospital. I was only five, but I vividly remember how terrible it was. I would cough until my whole body rocked, and it was very painful. The cough was absolutely terrible, like my lungs were trying to jump out of my chest. We went into urgent care after I had an almost uncontrollable coughing spell and other symptoms. I asked my parents about it later, and they admitted they did not understand half of the things that they had to sign. The doctors and nurses were all perfectly professional and treated us well, but my parents said the forms all looked like they were about a mile long.

Realistically, how reasonable was it to expect my parents to have much understanding of any nuances of the situation? They are both well-educated people in their own ways, but neither has a background in any kind of healthcare. The world of the hospital was relatively foreign to them before this. In later years it would become less foreign, especially after I broke my arm (age 12) and my older sister had to have an appendectomy (when I was 15 and she was 17). Honestly, I think when I had to go to the hospital for my pertussis my parents could not have understood much beyond the fact that I was very, very sick and needed care very urgently. Both of them said that they tried to read what they were signing, but they were in such a state and the forms seemed so complex that it was completely lost on them.

I would imagine that a non-native speaker of English or someone who might be a native speaker but has little education would be even more intimidated in such a situation than my parents were. The knowledge gap between patient and medical professional is much greater when there is a language barrier: even if the patient is well-educated and smart, they cannot understand what their healthcare professionals are saying, and I imagine that would be terrifying. Similarly for someone with little education, I would imagine that it would be very hard because the whole healthcare field is so specialized and requires so much education to even begin to comprehend most things.

An important point for how to improve this whole process is that patients do not necessarily need to have specialized knowledge (Sheaff, 1996, p. 112). Lay knowledge, more broadly accessible knowledge, is perfectly sufficient. In other words, patients do not have to understand what is wrong with them at the level that the doctor does: they can be led to understand it in lay terms. Here, what is important is for healthcare professionals to be patient and understanding, and explain to patients what is wrong and what the procedures will entail from a lay standpoint. In other words, healthcare professionals need to be able to generalize and extrapolate, so that they can take their highly specialized knowledge and present it to the patient in a form that the patient will understand (p. 112).

Personalizing the sharing of knowledge is another very effective strategy (Bali, Candy, & Dwivedi, 2010, p. 81). Here, the key idea is to first draw out what the patient does and does not know, and to have them describe their needs as best they can. This may not always be possible in an emergency situation, but in many cases it can be very helpful, especially in cases where the patient will need some kind of ongoing care. The approach entails sharing information in a way that is calculated to meet the patient’s knowledge needs and specific health, in effect meeting the patient where they are with information that is particularly relevant to them (p. 81). Giving the patient as much control as possible or practical is another important strategy (Committee on Crossing the Quality Chasm [CCQC], 2006, p. 78). Here, transparency and accountability are important. If the healthcare professionals are transparent and accountable, they can give the patient more options, and more of a sense of having some control over the situation (p. 78). This can greatly ease a patient’s mind and help them to do better clinically (p. 78).

References

Bali, R., Candy, P. C., & Dwivedi, A. (Eds.). (2010). Healthcare knowledge management: Issues, advances, and successes. New York: Springer Science + Business Media, LLC.

Committee on Crossing the Quality Chasm. (2006). Improving the quality of health care for mental and substance-use conditions. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press.

Sheaff, W. R. (1996). The need for health care. New York: Routledge.