Nurses are the largest group of health care professionals and spend a considerable amount of time with the patients, having major impact on their caring experience, this is also the case for the older people’s care. This type of care demands specialist skills to meet the older people’s needs. Especially nurses working in the community settings, are the first health care professionals who come in contact with large groups of people, making assessments and recognizing early signs of poor health and other problems, acting as gatekeepers for the Health care services. In many cases, nurses have to face the questions and pressure by the worried family with inadequate levels of health literacy and ehealth literacy. People with low health literacy make higher use of healthcare services, do not follow treatment plan, stay longer in Hospital, do not follow preventive strategies and have lower self-efficacy (Palumbo et al, 2016). Furthermore, according to relevant research, nursing professionals may be aware of the term health literacy but only a small percentage (<40%) understands how the ability of the patients to navigate in the health care system, to read medical material and follow the recommended treatment is linked to health literacy of the patients and their families (Macabasco-O’Connell & Fry-Bowers, 2011). According to a European project among 12 European countries, the first two reasons on tasks left unfinished included the communication and education of the patients and their families by nurses (Jones et al, 2015). With this project, we aim: a) to enhance the knowledge and skills of nurses, nurses students regarding the concepts of Health and eHealth Literacy, how to identify low health and eHealth literate older people and families, users of health care services b) to enhance indirectly the health literacy and ehealth literacy skills of older people and their families, c) to provide a practice guide for this type of training, d)to raise awareness of the users’ health literacy and ehealth literacy topic within the healthcare sector. The blended training will develop 3 core dimensions: ways and tools to identify the low Health and eHealth literate patients, ways and tools to educate patients with low health and eHealth literacy and a tailored module for nurses to enhance their own eHealth Literacy skills. With eLILY2, three modules for Nurses will be developed: 1) Identifying and understanding the health care service users with low Health Literacy: common signs, tools used to measure health literacy, psychosocial issues related with limited health literacy and impact on patient’s outcomes. You can add here, increasing nurses’ awareness of the outcomes of low health literacy 2) Educating health service users to increase their empowerment and self-efficacy in dealing with health problems: methods to enhance communication and of verification of patient’s understanding, best practices of medical material, use of pictures for patient’s education, resources of “plain language 3) enhancing eHealth literacy skills among nurses and other health care professionals. Apart from that, during the project and as part of the dissemination plan, a website will be developed and other dissemination material (leaflets, banners, newsletters) to promote the project aims to interested stakeholders. The website will be developed in a way that will host information about Health and eHealth Literacy, news and events in relation to the project and other related organizations material to read and will be linked with the eLearning course. The training will be piloted in 100 nurses and/or nurses students (20 per partner) and the eLearning course to 290 nursing students . Partners will collaborate with the Nurses and Midwives associations to promote the training among nurses and Universities will reassure the continuation of the training by integrating it in the students' curriculum as part of other related courses (e.g. Health Promotion, theories of Health) or by adding as a course. This will safeguard the sustainability of the project after completion. In this way, we will raise awareness on the topic of Health Literacy and eHealth Literacy to the partners’ organisations, nurses and nursing students, the participants in the piloting, and the families and older people.
With this project, we aimed: a) to enhance the knowledge and skills of nurses, nurses students regarding the concepts of Health and eHealth Literacy, how to identify low health and eHealth literate older people and families, users of health care services b) to enhance nurses' oral and written communication skills with older healthcare users, c) to provide a practice guide for this type of training, d)to raise awareness of the users’ health literacy and ehealth literacy topic within the healthcare sector.
Nurses are the largest group of health care professionals and spend a considerable amount of time with the patients, having major impact on their caring experience, this is also the case for the older people’s care. This type of care demands specialist skills to meet the older people’s needs. Especially nurses working in the community settings, are the first health care professionals who come in contact with large groups of people, making assessments and recognizing early signs of poor health and other problems, acting as gatekeepers for the Health care services. People with low health literacy make higher use of healthcare services, do not follow treatment plan, stay longer in Hospital, do not follow preventive strategies and have lower self-efficacy. According to relevant research, nursing professionals may be aware of the term ehealth literacy but only a small percentage (<40%) understands how the ability of the patients to navigate in the health care system, to read medical material and follow the recommended treatment is linked to health literacy and health outcomes of the patients and their families.