Technology And Engagement

Technology And Engagement
Technology And Engagement
I have included a great article on this topic. It is way too long for everyone to read right now. I would suggest reading the section, “Engaging Patients, Families, and Caregivers in Health Management”, this is about 1/2 way down the article. I like this section because it actually talks about incorporating technology to engage our families.
There was no difference in health literacy scores between men and women, though ethnicity was associated with total health literacy scores, and with functional and communicative health literacy, with black and minority ethnic (BME) respondents having lower scores. Greater age was associated with lower critical health literacy scores only. Higher education level was associated with higher scores on all aspects of the scale, though with a weaker relationship to critical health literacy. Higher overall scores as well as scores on the functional and critical health literacy subscales appeared to predict better individual health rating, though this association did not hold for communicative health literacy. There was evidence that those who reported the presence of a long-term health condition had higher communicative health literacy scores. Those who had previously attended their GP surgery more recently had lower functional health literacy scores. Conducting a series of Chi-square tests on each item and participant characteristics provided more detail about these associations (see Table 2). There did not appear to be any association between the questions relating to active involvement in the community level health initiatives (Questions Emp 1–Emp 3) and any participant characteristics or self-assessed health.
4. Discussion and conclusion
4.1. Discussion
This paper reports on efforts to design a tool to assess health literacy which is brief, easy to use in community health settings, is congruent with the concerns of users and providers of health services, and encompasses a range of health literacy competencies. It provides a useful addition to existing health literacy measures as it constitutes a new attempt to integrate recent theorising and debate around the health literacy concept into a practical tool appropriate for diverse populations. There are three key novel aspects of this scale. The first is the inclusion of a question on access to support for making sense of written health information which will prompt health care providers to consider functional health literacy as a ‘‘distributed’’ as well as ‘‘individual’’ compe- tence. Secondly, our communicative health literacy questions draw on an evidence based patient communication skills as employed in actual health consultations. Third, our critical health literacy questions were more explicitly linked to recent theoretical understandings of this concept beyond previous researchers’ emphasis on information appraisal.