The nursing list. "Do's & don'ts" when dealing with childhood obesity.

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." This saying can go far when it comes to nurses doing all they can to help literacy challenged families deal with childhood obesity. For nurses, the challenge is to be an educator now so as not to have to be a provider later--helping families prevent the unhealthy situation in hopes that the condition never presents itself.

Health literacy: the low-hanging fruit in health care reform.

Health care reform begins with remaking our system back into more of a health care system, not a sick care system. We need to provide moderate incentives for providers and patients to spend time on education and wellness, and to do it in a manner that ensures patients can understand. We need to look critically at how we communicate with patients, what demands we are making of them, what skills they need to meet those demands, and how we are making sure that they can do what we ask them to do.

Chronic illness management and health literacy: an overview.

Poor literacy skills can severely compromise effective chronic illness management by the patient. Practitioners' awareness of the prevalence of low health literacy, or the ability to understand and appropriately act on healthcare instructions, among their patients is a first step toward making changes in the practice to ensure patients understand how to manage their chronic illnesses. Researchers and clinicians in the health literacy field gathered recently at a national health literacy conference and shared techniques used and studied in their practices to aid in more effective provider-patient communications and to help improve outcomes and successful patient management of their chronic illnesses.

Low health literacy: the impact on chronic illness management.

Purpose/objectives: Chronic disease affects 90 million American adults and disproportionately affects the elderly. Health literacy, or the ability to understand and apply information to care for oneself, is a challenge for the approximately 1 in 2 American adults who cannot read above a fifth-grade level. This article defines the problem of health literacy and provides useful information for case managers to better understand the scope of the problem and strategies for working with patients to ensure good communication.

Reducing the use of emergency medical resources among Head Start families: a pilot study.

The objective of this study was to determine whether self-care training with Head Start parents can improve their ability to manage the healthcare needs of their children measured by utilization of emergency department (ED) and physician services. Four hundred and six families in Head Start agencies were included in the study. Parents were given a low-literate self-help book entitled What To Do When Your Child Gets Sick.