The University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, United States.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Department of Surgery, United States.
Am J Surg. 2022 Dec;224(6):1497-1500. doi: 10.1016/j.amjsurg.2022.08.009. Epub 2022 Aug 28.
Patient education materials (PEMs) serve as a foundation for educating patients and families across all surgical fields but are often not understandable. The National Institute of Health (NIH) recommends that PEMs be written at a grade 6-7 reading level; however, most current materials exceed that measure. Lack of understandable and appropriate surgical PEMs compounds the difficulties that low health literacy patients face with resultant poor surgical outcomes. The challenge for surgeons is to adequately educate patients pre-operatively and post-operatively on the complexities of surgery. Another challenge is to compact decades of education and training into an easy-to-understand medium for patients. To address this challenge, many physicians have utilized visual aids to improve PEM efficacy. While visual aids are a critical piece of education materials, they must be designed intentionally to be effective. The most important consideration is that the PEM communicates the information clearly to users. With this in mind, we created a framework for productive utilization of visual aids by integrating the C.A.R.P. graphic design technique into an existing surgical PEM to enhance communication and understandability.
患者教育材料(PEM)是在所有外科领域教育患者和家属的基础,但往往难以理解。美国国立卫生研究院(NIH)建议 PEM 的写作水平应达到 6-7 年级;然而,目前大多数材料都超过了这一标准。缺乏易懂且合适的外科 PEM 增加了低健康素养患者面临的困难,导致手术结果不佳。外科医生面临的挑战是在术前和术后充分教育患者了解手术的复杂性。另一个挑战是将数十年的教育和培训压缩成易于患者理解的媒介。为了应对这一挑战,许多医生已经利用视觉辅助工具来提高 PEM 的效果。虽然视觉辅助工具是教育材料的重要组成部分,但它们必须经过精心设计才能发挥作用。最重要的考虑因素是 PEM 能够将信息清晰地传达给用户。考虑到这一点,我们通过将 C.A.R.P.图形设计技术集成到现有的外科 PEM 中,创建了一个用于有效利用视觉辅助工具的框架,以增强沟通和可理解性。