Health Literacy Issues Among Women with Visual Impairments

There are few blog posts I enjoy as much as sharing a fresh publication, really. So here's a new article out in Research in Gerontological Nursing, with Tracie Harrison from the UT School of Nursing as the first author. The abstract is:

The purpose of this secondary analysis using qualitative description was to explore health literacy using the health care experiences of women with permanent visual impairments (VIs). Interviews were analyzed from a sample of 15 community-dwelling women ages 44 to 79 with permanent VIs who had participated in a larger grounded theory study. The 15 women were interviewed twice; the audio-recorded interviews were then transcribed verbatim and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Using the Institute of Medicine’s definition of health literacy, the women’s experiences were categorized into their ability to obtain, process, and understand health information. Their perceptions of the factors that influenced their health literacy were also explored. The women voiced that barriers to their ability to gain information in a format amenable to their processing skills, combined with barriers arising from health care providers’ attitudes, undermined their ability to build health literacy capacity.

The full article is available on the journal website here.

County-by-County Public Health

I'm sure this is going to be one of the big health items in the next news cycles, but it's also going to be really handy for health communication researchers looking to justify using a sample drawn from particular counties. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation just has a write-up of the research, conducted by folks at UW-Madison, looking at public health on a county-by-county basis around the U.S.

The actual website where you can dig into the data is available at County Health Rankings. It's a very well done website, which lets you dig down into every state to get some good stats on each. There are other reports that let you sort counties based on health outcomes and health factors, get more extensive reports on each state, etc. Really, really good stuff.

Travis County, #7 in Texas, there we go!

Vaccine Follow-Up, Mental Health

Sometimes I have the feeling that the good people of On the Media are producing that program just for me... Last week's episode served as more evidence of that, given their coverage of the retraction of the vaccine-autism article from The Lancet. OTM brought on the editor of The Lancet to discuss how the whole affair will change how the journal deals with the media and the scientific community. It's an interesting segment: A Shot of Reality.

It seems like the buzz about this retraction died out very quickly, which is a little disappointing. Like I said previously, it's hard to imagine the retraction really having much of an impact on people who strongly believe that vaccines have a link to autism, having this retraction out there in the mainstream media a bit more might have helped reach those people that don't have any opinion yet.

This past week OTM took a look at the proposed revisions to the DSM, which was one of the bigger health topics this week. OTM's take, The Art of Diagnosis, featured some interesting history of various conditions in the media - neat stuff which I certainly had never heard before. NPR Talk of the Nation (here) and On Point with Tom Ashbrook (here) also touched on the DSM changes and other mental health issues in the last week.

My work hasn't really focused on mental health, but one of the more interesting components of a health communication class I taught a few semesters ago was related to mental health. I think it's a fascinating area of work, I keep wondering why I haven't dug into it more directly yet... Perhaps in my next round of projects.

Finally, I wanted to point readers to Roxanne Parrot's blog: Talking About Health - Why Health Communication Matters. Roxanne's work is well-known to anyone working in health communication, and her blog will be a good way to keep up on what she's thinking right now. Definitely go check it out.

National Conference on Health Com, Marketing, and Media

Helping spread the word on this...

Save the Date: Fourth National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pleased to announce the fourth annual National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media to be held August 17 - 19, 2010, at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, GA. This conference brings together individuals representing academia, public health researchers and practitioners from federal and state government and the private sector, and provides a forum for collegial dialogue within and across these disciplines. The conference is an excellent opportunity to meet with colleagues and shape the future of health communication, marketing, and media practice.

Abstract submissions for the 2010 Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media will be open in early March 2010. More information regarding the conference will be sent as it becomes available. Please sign up on the conference webpage (http://www.cdc.gov/healthmarketing/NCHCMM2009/) to ensure that you receive those email updates.

Journal Retracts 1998 Paper Linking Autism to Vaccines: Who Cares?

From The New York Times: Journal Retracts 1998 Paper Linking Autism to Vaccines

The article discusses some of the background on the original research led by Andrew Wakefield that was published in The Lancet, additional research efforts to confirm a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and potential ethical concerns with the original research.

I found this particular sequence in the article to be particularly interesting:

Jim Moody, a director of SafeMinds, a parents’ group that advances the notion the vaccines cause autism, said the retraction would strengthen Dr. Wakefield’s credibility with many parents.

“Attacking scientists and attacking doctors is dangerous,” he said. “This is about suppressing research, and it will fuel the controversy by bringing it all up again.

I was talking about this in the office a couple days ago, and the conversation was about whether or not this retraction will matter. My initial reaction is that it won't - the people who believe there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism aren't likely to be swayed by the retraction of this article. Indeed, it may strengthen their conviction that the government/academia/big pharma are trying to bury the truth.

This article reminds me of a NPR Science Friday that was on probably a couple months ago. They had a vaccine expert on talking about this, and a parent called in who believed there was a MMR vaccine-autism link. The vaccine expert explained his view of the science and facts. The parent said he wasn't right. At some point (because he's a good host) Ira Flatow asked the caller if there was anything the vaccine expert could say that would change her mind. The caller thought for a moment, then replied (IMHO) honestly: "Probably not."

I don't know that this is something I'm going to dig into myself, but there's an interesting study here - particularly if you have pre-data on people's opinions of the MMR vaccine-autism link or we can assume that plenty of people never heard about the retraction (probably a safe bet) to do a pre/post survey to see what impact it has on people's opinions.