JRSM > Volume 96, Number 7 > Pp. 370

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Letters

Information recall by patients

Kai Ming Chow

Department of Medicine & Therapeutics, Prince of Wales Hospital, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, China

E-mail: Chow_Kai_Ming{at}alumni.cuhk.net

In his review article (May 2003 JRSM¹) Dr Kessels indicates that patients recall as little as half of what they are told by their physicians. With reference to low-literacy patients, he contends that neither spoken nor written information is efficient to improve memory performance. That said, interactive communication skills deserve emphasis as a means to better convey the verbal information. Simply asking patients to restate what they have been told is associated with better information retention.² Clearly, overlooking the information-verifying strategy could have been one of the main reasons for losing the take-home message. Suffice here to quote the example of a study (involving diabetic patients with low functional health literacy) in which glycaemic control was significantly better for patients whose primary care physicians assessed recall or comprehension. Physician assessment as such is best illustrated by the conversation³ below:

Physician: 'So... let's make sure. What medications are we going to change?'

Patient: 'I think we're going to stop this one (is it metformin?)... and I'm going to take glipizide twice a day... I think that's the green one...'

REFERENCES

1. Kessels RP. Patients' memory for medical information. J R Soc Med 2003;96: 219 -22[Free Full Text]

2. Bertakis KD. The communication of information from physician to patient: a method for increasing patient retention and satisfaction. J Fam Pract 1977; 5: 217 -22[Medline]

3. Schillinger D, Piette J, Grumbach K, et al. Closing the loop: physician communication with diabetic patients who have low health literacy. Arch Intern Med 2003; 163: 83 -90[Abstract/Free Full Text]

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This Article Full Text (PDF) Send a Quick Comment Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when Quick Comments are posted Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Chow, K. M. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Social Bookmarking                      What's this?