Embedding Health Literacy in Clinical Practice

Ensuring patients understand health information during a consultation can be difficult. When patients do not understand their diagnosis or management plan, this leaves them at risk of adverse events, poor quality care, hospital admissions. There are different approaches and tools available for checking patient understanding, such as teachback. There is limited evidence surrounding how such approaches and tools are used in clinical practice. This project involves examining how clinicians check patient understanding in practice, including whether and how they use tools such as teachback. This will be done using a database of over 120 recorded consultations available for secondary analysis. We will identify excerpts of interaction that include an understanding check. These will be analysed using conversation analysis to establish effective conversational practices for clinicians to check patient understanding. We will also examine the relationship between health literacy and the Principal Agent Relationship theory in practice. Exploring health literacy in practice across different specialties and professions will enable us to identify a range of practices and evaluate their effectiveness.