Terminology
The ability to read, understand, and use health information.
What is health literacy?
This federal law requires healthcare organizations to protect patient information and empowers patients by guaranteeing access to their own records and facilitating secure, direct communication, such as compliant emails or texts, which can improve understanding and health engagement.
What is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)?
This teaching method checks patient understanding by asking them to repeat information in their own words.
What is the Teach-Back Method?
This organization focuses on improving healthcare quality and safety nationwide, requiring hospitals to assess patient learning needs—including communication, cultural, and literacy barriers.
What is The Joint Commission?
This ethical principle supports patients' right to understand and make informed decisions about their care.
What is autonomy?
Difficulty understanding medical instructions or information.
What is limited health literacy?
This is the first federal statute to focus on advance directives and the right of adults to refuse life-sustaining treatment. Information provided must describe the person's legal rights in that state to make decisions concerning medical care, to refuse treatment, and to formulate advance directives, plus the relevant written policies of the institution.
What is the Patient Self-Determination Act?
The use of simple language instead of medical jargon.
What is plain language?
Low health literacy is directly associated with an increase in negative quality measures, in particular these two.
What are hospitalization and ER utilization?
This ethical principle requires nurses to act in the patient's best interest when teaching, preventing harm and creating practices and environments that help others achieve their maximum health potential.
What is beneficence?
What are discharge instructions?
This law promotes equal access to healthcare information for individuals with disabilities, requiring information be provided in accessible formats (e.g., braille, large print, sign language) to help individuals understand and make informed health decisions.
What is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?
This concept involves tailoring education to the patient's level of understanding, is about the patients, with the patients, and for the patients.
What is patient-centered education?
Preventable harm resulting from misunderstood care instructions, such as medication errors or improper self-care, rather than a patient's underlying condition.
What is an adverse event?
This ethical principle means "do no harm," especially when patients misunderstand information, preventing harm caused by patient misunderstandings through clear communication, education, and validation of understanding.
What is nonmaleficence?
The patient's ability to make informed healthcare decisions.
What is decision-making capacity?
This act mandates federal documents (often used in hospitals) to be in plain, simple language.
What is Plain Writing Act (2010)?
This term describes a patient's ability to understand and follow a treatment plan.
What is treatment adherence?
Failure to document education can lead to this legal risk.
What is liability?
This ethical principle involves ensuring patients receive fair and equal access to understandable health information, ensuring individuals receive fair and equal healthcare regardless of race, age, gender, ethnicity, or social status.
What is justice?
Specialized language, terminology, and acronyms used by healthcare professionals to communicate quickly and precisely about diseases, procedures, anatomy, and treatments.
What is medical jargon?
This law prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin, including discrimination based on English proficiency, requiring language access services for patients with limited English proficiency.
What is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
A communication technique that breaks complex health information into small, manageable, and logical, thematic segments to improve patient comprehension and recall.
What is chunking?
A national initiative that guides nurses to redesign the 'what and how' they deliver nursing care so that they can ensure high-quality, safe care, equipping nurses with knowledge, skills, and attitudes to assess literacy levels, tailor communication, and use techniques like the "teach-back" method to ensure patient understanding.
What is Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN)?
This ethical principle requires nurses to be truthful and transparent when providing information about a patient’s health status, treatment options, and outcomes.
What is veracity?