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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume XI, Number 1 |
September
2005 |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume XI, Number 1 |
September
2005 |
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Improving Medical Students’ Cultural Competency
Brian A. Primack and Thuy D. Bui, School of Medicine, and Carl I. Fertman, School of Education, will use their 2005 ACIE award in their project entitled Improving Medical Students’ Cultural Competency through Developing Community Patient Education Materials: Health Literacy Meets Social Marketing . Primack suggests that poor health literacy is a major problem in medicine today, depleting between $29 and $69 billion dollars in health care services a year (e.g., use of unnecessary emergency services and hospital visits). Employing social marketing models, Primack, Bui, and Fertman are developing instructional modules for medical students on the design and distribution of patient education materials to improve health literacy. Upon completion of the instructional models, each student will design and create an instructional brochure on a health issue evident in his or her clinical practicum community. By developing instructional materials for their clinical populations, first year medical students will recognize the discrepant levels of health literacy among groups within communities and will become increasingly comfortable delivering salient patient information and care to those groups. Because the marketing model directs attention to the key issues of getting the right message to the correct audience, Primack says that the medical students will “get into the minds of the patients” and, as a result, increase the health literacy of those patients. Five patient education brochures will be selected by a panel of doctors each year to be professionally produced for distribution to the communities’ patient populations. (The first five brochures have already been selected, produced, and distributed.) The five applicable communities will then be surveyed to assess public reaction to the materials and the project’s impact on those communities. In addition, the selected materials will be added annually to a community-accessible, searchable database of tailored patient education brochures. | |||||||||||||||||
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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