Perhaps you’re among the 60 percent of all American adults who are dealing every day with one or more chronic medical conditions. Or among the nearly half of us who have accompanied a relative or friend in the complex health care system? How often have you thought: If only we’d understood, we would have made different choices. That’s what people often say after days, months or even years of medical decision making for themselves or for a loved one. What is essential to being an empowered patient, a decisive health care proxy or an engaged health care professional? HEALTH LITERACY. It’s recognizing when, how and where to access, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make informed choices.
A perfect storm of health care is peeking over the horizon. It is the inevitable clash of: 1) America’s aging and chronically ill population; 2) the dwindling financial and human resources to address their needs; and 3) our pervasive lack of health literacy. As a health care consumer, only you can preserve your rights to informed consent, autonomy and safety by taking the steps necessary to be an empowered and effective decision maker. Only you can properly prepare your trusted loved ones to act as your informed substitute decision makers, if the need ever arises. As importantly, only you can achieve the health literacy needed to do the best job possible as an advocate for someone else.
In the pages of THE 60-MINUTE GUIDE TO HEALTH LITERACY, you will find these common sense tools:
* Reliable resources for health care information (hyperlinked in the Kindle version) * Step-by-step guides for shared decision making * Vital and effective documentation needed for any health care situation * A HELP Index for quick access to health literate action steps
By downloading the Kindle version to your smartphone, you will have all the resources and action steps of THE 60-MINUTE GUIDE TO HEALTH LITERACY at your fingertips. Jo shares how to:
* Preserve personal values with informed decision making * Assemble the best team of health care providers * Follow recommendations for preventive care * Maintain patient autonomy in a health care emergency * Practice the responsible use of medications * Make respectful and informed end-of-life decisions
Preserving the rights to informed consent, autonomy and safety is entirely dependent on the medical decision maker’s ongoing level of health literacy. If you don’t know it already, you will soon learn that advocating for yourself or a loved one is a challenging responsibility. The 60-MINUTE GUIDE TO HEALTH LITERACY is the road map for that journey.
