Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills

This book is truely a classic in the field of patient education. Everyone who teaches patients/clients should read this book as much of what is written for patients -- can't be read by them. The number of illiterate and poor readers in this country is unbelievable yet this is sledom taken into consideration by health professionals. I had the pleasure to attend an all day seminar given by Cecilia and Leonard Doak years ago and have used their lessons since.

I wish I could tell everybody who has ever produced any kind of health information material to read this book. The advice it gives has helped me write more clearly period - not just for people with low literacy. Given the overwhelming amount of about health care information in the news and on the Web, health communicators need to make their messages accessible and meaningful or get lost in the shuffle. This book shows you how.

This book is misnamed. It shows you not only how to teach patients with low literacy skills--but all patients! Teaching Patients With Low Literacy Skills shows you how to apply current research findings to actively involve your learner and enhance understanding and retention. It shows you how to prepare written and audiovisual materials so they most effectively teach. Best of all, the Suitability Assessment of Materials form helps you evaluate teaching materials, quantitatively, so you invest your limited patient ed dollars wisely in the best teaching tools.It's the classic in the field. This is the book everyone else quotes. Including me.

Selected in Brandon & Hill nursing bibliography (Nursing Outlook, March-April, 1996)for nursing collections.

Thank you for this most useful manual in helping us understand the barriers to learning and how to overcome them. I work in a Family Practice Residency in which many of our patients have low literacy skills. We use this text to evaluate our spoken words and written texts offered to our patients. I was asked to summarize one of the chapters to present at a meeting, and found this text can't be summarized...it is already as concise as it can be made, with every word necessary. We ordered several teaching tools shown in the later chapters and have found them to be helpful as well. We checked out the text from our Health Science Library, liked it so well we got one of our own for the office, and I just bought one for myself to keep at home