Health literacy, the skills we need to interpret health information and make health decisions, is an increasingly important topic. Afterall, Canadians tend to have low health literacy, and this is linked to poorer health outcomes and higher healthcare costs.
Samuel Harder and Sergiy Shatenko (IMP Class of 2019) have suggested a possible solution to the issue in their article “Why you should Mini-Med School: Mini-Med School as an intervention to increase health literacy,” published in the Canadian Medical Education Journal.
L – R: Sergiy Shatenko and Samuel Harder (IMP Class of 2019)
Sergiy and Samuel found that elderly participants significantly improved their health literacy after attending Mini-Med School, a six-lecture series delivered by medical students at the University of Victoria’s Medical Sciences Building. The lectures focused on topics that often come up in primary care, including disease prevention, navigating the healthcare system, understanding medical testing, brain health, and heart health.
The participants, who were part of the University of Victoria Retirees Association, improved in seven of nine health literacy scales when they took the Health Literacy Questionnaire six weeks after the lecture series.
Along with showing that Mini-Med School can be an effective tool to increase health literacy, the paper discusses the potential of the lecture series as a way for Canadian medical schools and students to engage with their communities.
Sergiy and Samuel conducted the research for this paper as their second-year FLEX project under the supervision of Dr. Jane Gair. Prior to publication, they presented their work at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education in 2019.