Transcriber: Shree Patel Reviewer: Hani Eldalees
I’ve read countless stories of people wearing masks below noses
wearing birth control rings as bracelets, even losing oxygen as an allergy,
these easily avoidable mistakes,
not the fault in health care system & way that we educate the public.
How many people’ve been confused by something doctor say
or walk from doctor’s office
Completely clueless? In my experience, working at a hospital in India.
I notice huge difference between management of illness
and success of treatment, even with the same level of treatment plan offered
and doctor competency. While conducting research on tuberculosis awareness,
I found that government of India pioneered many containment strategies,
but they failed to tailor these strategies to
brain health awareness of public.
The success to healthy world is health empowerment of its end users.
Both doctors and the patient must work together to achieve
a common goal that is the health literacy of the public.
The doctor needs to empower patient & provide them
information to safeguard their own health.
And the patient needs to understand and put in
the effort to follow guidelines set by the health care professional.
A study in Netherlands recently found that low health literacy translate into
less involvement in medical decision making for people of all race,
gender and income. As a medical student myself,
I have seen firsthand how people of all demographics struggle to make decisions
regarding their treatment and care simply
because they’re unable to understand what doctor has said to them.
This confusion and inability to understand information required
for decision making points out
problems we still face in health care literacy.
As recently as 40 years ago,
tuberculosis was a huge threat in England and was one of
the primary causes of death for hundreds of years and yet
a once enormous public health threat was brought under control.
& to do that, they started at core of the problem.
That is public health awareness.
Steve Jobs once said you have to start with the customer experience
& work backwards towards the technology, not the other way around.
In this case, the customer that is the patient must be at
core of the strategy.
A lot of interest in funding goes to medical research, which is very important.
But the knowledge is futile when the implementation does not address
the biggest variable, which is human participation.
It has its own socio economic, religious, cultural and geographical differences.
And this is what makes human participation such
dificult problem to tackle
Now lets look at each of these bit more closely.
How do we turn the ocean of unknown into familiar facts of disease?
Well, there are 3 steps
1st, we need to understand health literacy level of the public.
What are specific areas we need to target?
2nd, we need to partner & engage with public to drive
illness into wellness.
Finally, we need to set clearly defined end points back with scientific data
and periodic appraisal to test the effectiveness.
So how do we understand health literacy level of the public?
Information spread is more powerful when presented in
manner that is more relatable to its audience.
For example, social distancing and the time of a disease outbreak is a privilege
for some people
Some people simply cannot afford to maintain distance in their
living quarters. Hence the idea of
a social bubble with isolation of each individual bubble
and continued use of mass makes more sense and is more likely to be followed.
We need to keep it simple.
Trying to teach people about particulate matter
& viral strains is not going to work for everyone.
We need to make it engaging for the audience.
Use pictorial representations to leave a long lasting impression
and appeal to them. Moving on to the second step,
how do we engage and partner with the public? incentivization not only
for people to take better care of themselves, but for patients,
for doctors and health care professionals to manage patient pool better is
an effective strategy. In kindergarten,
Getting a gold star for a job well done works motivate children to work harder
and do better. At the same time,
we use decentralisation for less than ideal compliance with actions.
For example, sugar tax and tobacco tax,
where companies were tax based on their tobacco
and sugar content in order to combat lifestyle diseases was
an effective strategy. How information is presented to the public has
a huge impact on how information is received.
Public health goals are more likely to be followed when they engage with
the public and the presented data inspires the public to participate.
Control the context & you control mind,
control the mind and you control reality.
A remarkable example of this is how India beat polio.
Viral misinformation, pardon the pun,
has historically travelled faster than vaccines in India.
The history of vaccination in India offers some important lessons.
While polio eradication was a success story, it has not been without challenges.
India with some serious resistance to vaccination.
And yet it was a success not only because they understood the fears
& apprehensions of the public
but because they took vaccine doorstep to doorstep
thereby overcoming the hurdle of health care accessibility.
Research funding and policies
and medical sciences are incomplete without understanding and addressing
public’s fears & apprehensions & building the confidence of
the public health. Is not only a right of the citizens of the world,
but a duty as equal participants in their own health.
There are many tools we can use to improve health literacy,
& some of the best ones are most simple.
Ask questions and advocate for each other in trouble.
When u need more information & take control of your own health,
body is your most prized possession
Make sure u know how you’re paying for it. Thank you.