Magnet Nursing

Health Literacy

Health literacy is the ability to obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions and follow instructions for treatment.

It’s not unusual for health information to be written at or above the 10th-grade reading level, yet many American adults read at or below the 8th-grade reading level.

Health information can be difficult to understand if you don’t have a health care background because of the terminology and abbreviations often used. Aspirus nurses are working to improve the readability of our Day Surgery Discharge Instructions, by integrating Ask Me 3 into our Day Surgery discharge instruction forms to help our patients understand.

Ask Me 3 promotes three simple, but essential, questions and answers for every health care interaction:

  1. What is my main problem?

  2. What do I need to do? 

  3. Why is it important for me to do this?

We are integrating the Day Surgery Plus Discharge Instructions into Epic (our electronic medical record). This includes a “Teach Back” section for clinicians, which is one of the most effective health literacy interventions for clinical staff to use when working with all patients to check for understanding of health information.

Beginning in July 2009, the Geriatric Resource Nurse and Geriatric Resource Aide courses will incorporate health literacy into their agenda.

One of the most exciting initiatives Aspirus started this year is our Health Literacy Ambassador Program. As part of our Ambassador work, we met with the Literacy Council to review our Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) form. Our multi-professional team is making great progress with improving the readability of our Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) form used for when you are having surgery or a procedure.

If you would like to learn more about our Health Literacy initiatives, please contact Jan  Kraus, MLS, at 847.2184.

Kraus is the Manager of the Dr. Joseph F. Smith Medical Library at Aspirus Wausau Hospital, and Vol. Community Faculty at University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Family Medicine. She is the creator of, and principal advocate for, the Aspirus Health Literacy initiative, as well as the liaison for the Marathon Country Health Literacy initiative.

Current initiatives include:

  • Health Literacy presentations: education, training and awareness

  • Ask Me 3 Campaign

  • Brown Bag Medication Checks

  • Health Literacy Tracers (hospital and clinics)

  • Day Surgery Plus Discharge Instructions - Reducing Reading Level and integrating Teach-back in Epic (and Patient Friendly Sigs)

  • HealthStream module (integrating Health Literacy into our Patient Relations Module)

  • Aspirus Health Literacy Ambassador Program

  • Aspirus Health Literacy Web site.

  • Aspirus Health Literacy Committee (includes community members)