How Much do Patients Understand
Posted 2/16/2010
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One of the best parts of my job is a monthly teaching session with our first year Fellows. These are young doctors who have completed medical school and three years of residency training and could go out and begin to work as PCPs or internists. Instead, they devote another three to four years to specializing in hematology and oncology. At our meetings, we talk about "everything about being an oncologist except the medicine", and this translates to a lot of conversation about communication. I remind them, over and over, that people often do not understand or remember what the doctor tells them, and we practice direct and simple explanations. I was especially interested in this study from Cure about how much patients understand.
SInce it is all tables, I am unable to copy and paste it here, but here is a link, and this is an interesting read:
www.curetoday.com/health_literacy_survey.
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