Understanding health information in the community

Clinical Epidemiology - Cabrini

A/Prof Rachelle Buchbinder, Dr Richard Osborne, A/Prof Catherine Elder, Ms Rosemary Clerehan
& Dr Melissa Barber

As our health care system gets more complicated, more demands are being made on health consumers. Patients are increasingly being asked to share in the decision-making about their health. They are being expected to understand medical jargon and follow instructions about how to take their medications and/or tests they are having. Sometimes they are also given written information about their condition by their health professional or they may find this information themselves from a variety of sources including the internet. We want to know how well members of the general community understand health information. If we find out that understanding is suboptimal we want to work out ways of improving the situation.

While it is generally assumed that a substantial proportion of the general population has difficulty understanding medical information, we are not aware of any published Australian population data. We recently used a standard interviewer-administered questionnaire to assess 80 patients in community-based rheumatology practice and found that ~10% had limited understanding of health information indicating that may not even understand simple written instructions (manuscript submitted for publication). As this work was undertaken in the private health setting (where patients are known to be more highly educated), the extent of the problem is probably underestimated. Quantification at the population level is therefore urgently needed. Without this data, any policy development and public health initiatives can only be ill informed or stymied.

We therefore plan to investigate understanding medical information in a representative sample of the adult population. We will study it across socio-economic groups and other demographic and medical history variables. The results of this project are likely to make a significant contribution to the field of medical communication, provide valuable data to direct further research and ultimately lead to improved health outcomes.

Buchbinder R, Hall S, Youd J. (2005) Functional health literacy of rheumatoid arthritis patients attending a community-based rheumatology practice. J Rheum (under review)