Health Literacy as an Essential Component to Creating Sustainable Impacts in Short-term Medical Missions

Chen, CC. ； Hsu, WC. ； Hu, CC. ； Chen, T.

《The Proceedings of the 8th AHLA International Conference: Health Literacy in Social Resilience》 2022 (2022/12) Pp. 36-37

https://doi.org/10.30181/AHLA.202210.0022

摘要

INTRODUCTION: Traditional short-term medical missions (STMM) supplement healthcare delivery and education in areas of need, and require a shift for interdisciplinary interaction with local medical staff to achieve long-term sustainable impacts. Through partnership with Operation Smile Vietnam (OSV) and its alliances, E-DA Hospital (E-DA) has enhanced local surgeons’ microsurgery skills and has reduced cleft lip/palate (CL/P) patients in Vietnam over 9 years. During the pandemic, a tailored approach to building local partners’ health literacy (HL) was developed with the concepts of speech-and-language therapy (SALT) through a pilot online education platform. The SALT curriculum has been found to increase the capacity of local partners to better utilize the limited resources, allowing continuous improvement of healthcare quality for CL/P patients.
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to increase local partners’ knowledge and skills related to SALT through customized and local context online courses.
METHODS: The courses were developed by speech-language pathologists and E-DA staff which were translated into Vietnamese. The course development focused on adult learning principles and was piloted for quality improvement. Course topics centered on real-life scenarios of an STMM, covering feeding skills and SALT interventions. The cultural competence of the local context, combined with step-by-step explanations, and assisted with supplementary education videos with Vietnamese dubbing and subtitles was included in the course development.
RESULTS: 16 participants participated in the pilot curriculum. 13 evaluations were completed to evaluate the course objectives and contents and improved HL with a response rate of 81.3%. The mean score of overall satisfaction was 4.5 out of a maximum of 5 points. The highest satisfaction was for ""lecturer performance"" (4.69 mean points) and the lowest was for ""interpreter performance"" (4.27 mean points) among 4 dimensions. In ""enhance more awareness of SALT for CL/P"", 38% of respondents were strongly agreed and 62% was agreed. 69% was strongly agreed and agreed with ""feel able to apply the knowledge learned in the course to the job"". As for “be able to answer the majority of questions about SALT for CL/P from patient/family confidently"", 39% was neutral and 8% was disagreed. When asked about ""re-attend intention"", 69% had strong willingness, and 23% had willingness.
CONCLUSION: The feedback has allocated future plans to build a hybrid curriculum to improve local partners’ HL levels. Strengths included video and subtitle interpretation, with the cultural competence of the local context for case scenarios. The curriculum will be used for pre-mission education and can be accessed whenever for local partners. E-DA staff will host a live Q&A for further clarity, and integrate the curriculum competencies during STMMs when they resume in the post-pandemic. Further evaluations will monitor the impact of the curriculum for local partners’ capacity to deliver healthcare and guidelines for CL/P patients/families.

關鍵字

health literacy ； short-term medical mission ； sustainable impact