Understanding Your Audience

In any type of healthcare service, it is important to get to know your audience.  Understanding your audience is necessary for the success of your service.  Without knowing the specifics of your audience, you cannot make healthcare individualized or specific.  Some questions to ask yourself and your healthcare team are, what age group are you serving? Are there specific cultures?  What is the average education level of the people you are working with?  These types of answered questions can help you determine what the health literacy of your audience is.  Health literacy is how patients gather, process and understand health information and then use those to be able to make informed decisions about their health and the health of their loved ones.  Health literacy is something that can increase over time with ongoing education and supportive materials.  It is important to know a person’s health literacy because if a person does not understand the information you are giving them about their health there are many unfortunate outcomes that could occur.  Most significant is that they may not follow through with their care due to their lack of understanding.  It is important to understand that having one area of knowledge may not mean that someone is proficient in health literacy.  Health literacy is something that those of us in the health care system have obtained over time with education, training and exposure.  For many people, health literacy is a new thing and it could be something they have never been a part of.  Therefore, assessing one’s health literacy before providing information and providing treatment recommendations is essential to the success of the patient and their future health.
Information was sourced from the following source.  Check it out for more information on health literacy:  https://health.gov/communication/literacy/quickguide/factsbasic.htm