Check and Recheck that Health Information Is Understood
Volume 26
Number 5
www.healthywomen.org
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Even the simplest health information can easily be misunderstood or acted
on incorrectly. This fact underscores the need for health care professionals
to check and recheck a client's understanding of medical instructions and
for consumers to ask questions about instructions that they don't understand.
Consider these real-life examples of health communication gone awry:
•
A
teenaged girl becomes pregnant because her health care provider told her
to take her oral contraceptive every day, but didn't specify she should
take it orally. Instead, the girl was inserting the pill in her vagina.
•
The
mother of a two-year-old diagnosed with an ear infection is told to give
her child a teaspoon of an antibiotic twice daily. So she pours a teaspoon
of the medicine into her daughter's ears twice a day.2
• A nurse practitioner tells the mother of an infant with diarrhea to stop all formula and give her baby a fortified liquid supplement to avert dehydration to "see if it helps the diarrhea." Five days later, the mother calls back to see if she can now take the baby off the supplement. The nurse is upset that her instructions were unclear and that the baby has spent several days hungry.X
.....
© 2004 The National Women's Health Resource Center. All rights reserved. Reproduction of material published in the National Women's Health Report Online is encouraged with written permission from NWHRC.
