Will improvements in health journalism improve health literacy?

Today’s health care journalists work in a very different environment than those of yesterday. The demand for stories and broadcasts has grown exponentially, and the resources available have shrunk dramatically. While it may therefore be difficult to see how improvements in health care journalism are possible, let alone a way to improve health care literacy, there is an important connection that, if illuminated, could help both fields. To understand the literature on the quality of health care journalism, it is critical to understand the backgrounds of today’s health care journalists and the challenges they face. That literature also goes hand in hand with studies of the effects that news coverage has on the public’s understanding of health care issues. There are training and educational programs designed to help health care journalists do their jobs better, and this chapter concludes with a discussion of how cooperation between health journalists, physicians, and other stakeholders can lift all boats.

Download Full-text

Dedicated Severe Asthma Services Improve Health-care Use and Quality of Life

CHEST Journal ◽

10.1378/chest.14-3056 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 148 (4) ◽

pp. 870-876 ◽

Cited By ~ 64

Author(s):

David Gibeon ◽

Liam G. Heaney ◽

Chris E. Brightling ◽

Rob Niven ◽

Adel H. Mansur ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Quality Of Life ◽

Health Care ◽

Severe Asthma ◽

Health Care Use ◽

Improve Health Care ◽

Improve Health

Download Full-text

Digital Literacy for Health

Current Trends and Future Practices for Digital Literacy and Competence ◽

10.4018/978-1-4666-0903-7.ch013 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 142-152

Author(s):

Ela Klecun

Keyword(s):

Health Care ◽

Health Literacy ◽

Web 2.0 ◽

Quality Of Health Care ◽

Digital Literacy ◽

The Internet ◽

Sources Of Information ◽

Individual Use ◽

The Individual

This paper outlines and challenges expectations and promises regarding the potential of the internet and Web 2.0 for empowering patients and citizens. It focuses on literacies required to make a meaningful (to the individual) use of these technologies for health and health care related purposes. The author briefly discusses how these should be taught and concludes that these literacies, including digital literacy and health literacy, are complex and challenging to many while the empowering claims are over-stated. Traditional sources of information and advice will remain essential to maintaining quality of health care.

Download Full-text

Biomedical Engineering in Nepal: Opportunities and Challenges

Annapurna Journal of Health Sciences ◽

10.52910/ajhs.18 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 52-54

Author(s):

Sambardhan Dabadi ◽

Raju Raj Dhungel

Keyword(s):

Quality Of Life ◽

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Health Care ◽

Biomedical Engineering ◽

Medical Science ◽

Improve Health Care ◽

Engineering Discipline ◽

Improve Health ◽

Science Professional

Biomedical engineering is the blend of engineering and medical science, professional with a combination of knowledge of various engineering discipline to improve health care and quality of life. While biomedical engineering formally came up as major course in 1950s, the course started in Nepal just a decade back with its importance being acknowledged and biomedical engineers have been recruited by various institutes. Accounting for artificial intelligence, robotic surgery, 3-d printing, which are believed to be the future of medical science, it is necessary to strengthen the biomedical engineering. This article aims to highlight the overview as well as opportunities and challenges of biomedical engineering in Nepal.

Download Full-text

Effect of interventions to improve health care services for ethnic minority populations

Norsk Epidemiologi ◽

10.5324/nje.v20i1.1294 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Louise Forsetlund ◽

Morten Christoph Eike ◽

Gunn E. Vist

Keyword(s):

Health Care ◽

Cancer Screening ◽

Ethnic Minority ◽

Health Care Services ◽

Young Patients ◽

Educational Interventions ◽

Improve Health Care ◽

Care Services ◽

Improve Health

Objectives: Since the early 1990s there has been an increasing awareness of social and ethnic inequity in health and for the last few years there has also been an increasing focus on disparities in the quality of health services to ethnic minority groups. The aim of this review was to collect and summarise in a systematic and transparent manner the effect of interventions to improve health care services for ethnic minorities.<br />Methods: We searched several medical databases for systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials. Two researchers independently screened for and selected studies, assessed risk of bias, extracted data and graded the quality of the evidence for each outcome in the included studies. The analysis was done qualitatively by describing studies and presenting them in tables.<br />Results: We included 19 primary studies. The interventions were targeted at reducing clinical, structural and organisational barriers against good quality health care services. Eight studies examined the effect of educational interventions in improving outcomes within cross-cultural communication, smoking cessation, asthma care, cancer screening and mental health care. In six comparisons the effect of reminders for improving health care services and patient outcomes within cancer screening and diabetes care was examined. Two studies compared professional remote interpretation services to traditional interpretation services, two studies compared ethnic matching of client and therapist and two studies examined the effect of providing additional support in the form of more personnel in the treatment of diabetes and kidney transplant patients. Most patients were African-Americans and Latin-Americans and all ages were represented.<br />Conclusions: Educational interventions and electronic reminders to physicians may in some contexts improve health care and health outcomes for minority patients. The quality of the evidence varied from low to very low. The quality of available evidence for the other interventions was too low to draw reliable conclusions. We found no studies that only included young patients, but we suggest that interventions targeted at health personnel or health organisations may be applicable regardless of the age of the patient population. This review reveals that the evidence for interventions to improve health care for minorities is sparse and generally of low quality.

Download Full-text

Building Resilient Health Systems: Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone and the 2014 Ebola Outbreak*

The Quarterly Journal of Economics ◽

10.1093/qje/qjaa039 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Darin Christensen ◽

Oeindrila Dube ◽

Johannes Haushofer ◽

Bilal Siddiqi ◽

Maarten Voors

Keyword(s):

Health Care ◽

Sierra Leone ◽

Health Systems ◽

Quality Of Health Care ◽

Health Workers ◽

Perceived Quality ◽

Health Clinics ◽

Community Monitoring ◽

Improve Health

Abstract Skepticism about the quality of health systems and their consequent underuse are thought to contribute to high rates of mortality in the developing world. The perceived quality of health services may be especially critical during epidemics, when people choose whether to cooperate with response efforts and frontline health workers. Can improving the perceived quality of health care promote community health and ultimately help to contain epidemics? We leverage a field experiment in Sierra Leone to answer this question in the context of the 2014 West Africa Ebola crisis. Two years before the outbreak, we randomly assigned two interventions to government-run health clinics—one focused on community monitoring, and the other conferred nonfinancial awards to clinic staff. Prior to the Ebola crisis, both interventions increased clinic utilization and patient satisfaction. Community monitoring additionally improved child health, leading to 38 percent fewer deaths of children under five. Later, during the crisis, the interventions also increased reporting of Ebola cases by 62 percent, and community monitoring significantly reduced Ebola-related deaths. Evidence on mechanisms suggests that both interventions improved the perceived quality of health care, encouraging patients to report Ebola symptoms and receive medical care. Improvements in health outcomes under community monitoring suggest that these changes partly reflect a rise in the underlying quality of administered care. Overall, our results indicate that promoting accountability not only has the power to improve health systems during normal times, but can also make them more resilient to emergent crises.

Download Full-text