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EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION WITH HEALTH
CARE PROVIDERS
Making The Most Of Our Health Care
Contacts
1. Expect explanations about your own health
care issues.
- Insist on clear and understandable explanations from
your health care providers.
2. Ask for clarification if terms are used
that you do not understand.
- Stop the health care provider and ask that the
information be repeated in terms that you can understand. It is your right to
received understandable explanations.
3. Ask for an explanation of why your
concerns are unimportant.
- If your health care provider believes the new
disturbing symptom that you have just reported is not something to worry about, ask why.
4. Convey to your health care provider that
you know your body better than anyone else.
- You have lived with your illness or disability more
closely than anyone. Get to know your body and speak up if someone implies that you
do not.
5. If seeing a health care provider for the
first time, ask about accessibility of the facility.
- Finding out after you get there that it is not
accessible does not make for effective communication.
6. Prepare for your office visit.
- Make a list of your priorities before
you see your health care provider.
- Take a written list with you and make sure that your
health care provider does not get away before you get you discuss the issues.
- Put the list in front of you during the visit and if
a family member accompanies you to the visit, give the family member a copy. Having a list
of questions will not be interpreted by health care providers as an indication of
lack of trust on your part. Rather, it conveys the message that you have considered ahead
of time the issues that you think are important and want to discuss.
7. Practice ahead of time to make sure you
get your questions addressed.
- Ask a family member or friend to accompany you on
your visit and ask that person to write down your health care provider’s responses to
your questions and any recommendations and instructions that are given. It is all too easy
to forget what instructions your health care provider has given to you, when you are not
at your best, are bothered by new symptoms, are depressed or anxious.
8. Ask your health care provider to sit at
your eye level.
- Talking at eye level increases the effectiveness of
the visit.
9. Take advantage of the availability of
other health care providers who work with your health care provider if you are having some
difficulty communicating with your health care provider.
- For example, if you do not understand why you are
having symptoms even though you are taking medications that are supposed to prevent or
reduce symptoms, talk this over with the nurses in the office. They often are very
knowledgeable about the issue, have the information you need and may have a bit more time
to spend with you. The nurse may be able to help you sort out various issues and serve as
an intermediary to communicate your most important concerns to the physician. Consider the
nurse as a valuable resource and use her or him accordingly.
10. Educate yourself about health promotion
and disease prevention strategies that are important for your age group.
- Health promotion and disease prevention strategies
are important for each and every one of us, whether we have a disability or not.
- A disability does not protect you from heart
disease, cancer, respiratory problems, and other health problems that may result in part
from unhealthy lifestyles. However, these issues are often not at the top of list of
priorities of the neurologist we see for treatment of the disability.
- It is important to keep track of the date of our
last Pap smear, bone density test, mammogram or exam for an enlarged prostate. It is
important to have such exams and screening as recommended, because most people with
disabilities have a normal or near-normal life span.
11. Become an advocate for yourself and others.
Learn as much about your disabling condition as you can. This will:
- put you in a position of knowing what likely is and
what is not part of the picture of the disabling condition,
- reduce the chance that you and your health care
providers will attribute all health problems to the disability, and
- enable you to obtain health care from
others---internist, women’s health care providers, for example---if the problem is
NOT related to the disability.
12. Follow the advice of Hubie Blake and
other seniors and take of yourself as though you are going to live to be 100.
"If I had known I was
going to live this long,
I would have taken better care of my self."
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07/31/2003 11:34 AM |