Senior Connections Honored To Be Chosen As Key Team Member In UGA Federally Funded Health Study Program.

The University of Georgia’s Center for Health and Risk Communication (CHRC) has launched a two-year research project entitled “Meals on Wheels Volunteers as Health Literacy Coaches for Older Adults.” The project is funded by the National Institute on Aging as part of a federal health literacy research initiative. Health literacy is the capacity to acquire information about health and to use it in making informed decisions about one’s health behaviors and medical treatment. Low levels of health literacy—especially common among older adults--are linked to poor self-management of chronic disease, to misuse of medical resources such as emergency room visits, and to excess disease burden. One key to improving health literacy is to teach people to communicate better with their health care providers. The new CHRC project will partner with Meals on Wheels (MOW) volunteers to improve the capacity of homebound elderly clients to obtain information from their health care providers.

Senior Connections has been chosen by Meals on Wheels of America to participate in this study for the Metro Atlanta area and provide volunteers to be trained as health literacy coaches. The volunteers/coaches will be trained in communication skills (“Maximizing Brief Encounters”) as well as in health literacy. The project will train volunteers to serve as health literacy coaches to obtain answers they can understand to three simple questions every time they visit a physician, nurse, dentist, podiatrist, pharmacist, or any other health professional. In a controlled study, Information will be gathered about clients’ health literacy in interaction, in reading, about their satisfaction with their health care, and about their recollection and comprehension of their medical instructions—as well as several other related variables. 

Important outcomes of this research project will include new descriptive information about health literacy among rural and urban older adults.  It will also test a model for enhancing individuals’ health communication through brief encounters with engaged, trained lay persons--a model that should prove widely applicable and sustainable.  The success of this research project rests in large measure on securing active collaboration from MOW agencies and their committed volunteers and clients, other community stakeholders, as well as from CHRC’s panel of expert advisors.

Senior Connections is proud to have been chosen to participate in this study and will help spread the word about health literacy as information is provided to us. For further information on this study, please read the following article which appeared in the Atlanta Business Chronicle recently.

UGA gets stimulus for elderly health project

Atlanta Business Chronicle

The University of Georgia researchers Vicki Freimuth and Don Rubin got $970,039 in federal stimulus money for a two-year project that uses volunteers to help the vulnerable elderly improve their interaction with health care providers.

The project will train Meals on Wheels volunteers to become health literacy coaches for older adults. Meals on Wheels volunteers regularly bring meals to the elderly and disabled, who otherwise cannot provide food for themselves. The project will be conducted in DeKalb, Fulton and Cobb counties and in several rural counties in southwest Georgia.

“Older adults often are less likely to express their needs to doctors,” Freimuth said. “They are more passive patients.”

This passivity makes them less likely to ask questions when they don’t understand heath care professionals, which can impede treatment. For example, older adults are at risk of dangerous medication errors because they are not well-enough informed about how to properly take their medication.

Freimuth and Rubin’s research will focus on oral communication between health-care professionals and older adults. Many of the older adults receiving Meals on Wheels services are socially isolated, and their interaction with the volunteer is one of their few chances during the day for interaction.

The project will randomly assign 1,200 Meals on Wheels recipients to one of three treatment groups. In treatment one, the volunteers will not make any changes to their behavior.

The second treatment will ask Meals on Wheels volunteers to merely give “Ask-Me-3” health-promoting brochures and materials to their clients with a modicum of additional discussion. Ask-Me-3 is a patient education program developed in conjunction with the American Medical Association and other partners which encourages patients to ask three questions of health-care professionals: “What is my main problem?” “What do I need to do?” and “Why is it important for me to do this?”

The third treatment group for the project will receive the Ask-Me-3 brochures, as well as four brief coaching sessions by the Meals on Wheels volunteers. The coaching sessions will help the clients prepare for health appointments prior to visiting health care professionals.