Lisa Fitzpatrick, MD, MPH, Improves Health Literacy in Black Communities — Health Changemaker
[ad_1]
EH: Grapevine Health has a podcast as well. Can you share a bit about how you use the podcast to share health information?
LF: I started the podcast because I feel that we make a lot of decisions in healthcare, and we don’t really incorporate the patient or community voice. So, I set out on a mission to talk directly to people, rather than experts, about our [the Black community’s] experiences. I wanted patients and community members to talk about their experiences. That’s what the podcast is all about. Overall, Grapevine Health is really about elevating humanity and community voice and educating people in the process.
EH: Are your podcast and the Ask the Doctor chats intended only for the local DC community?
LF: Absolutely not. We want Grapevine Health to be a brand for trusted health information in the Black and brown communities. Because people like you and me, we have a lot of resources, we can find people we know who work in the health sector. A lot of people who wander into the emergency department don’t have a soul to call. We need to make sure they have resources available to them so they know where they can go if they are confused about something or if they need help. I’ll give you an example. I was on the street sometime last year, and this lady walked over to me and asked for my help. She asked me to read her discharge papers because she had just gotten discharged from the hospital, but was still feeling sick and didn’t know what to do.
She ran into me on the street, and here I am, a stranger, and she’s saying, “Help me. I just got out of the hospital, and I don’t understand what to do now.” That’s disgraceful. So, how do we create resources for people like her across the country and particularly in the South, where there’s a huge deficit in healthcare access? A lot of these states have not expanded Medicaid and people are just making do, or they’re just not getting care at all.
EH: Through your virtual efforts, do you have a way of assessing your reach in terms of your audience base and the kind of impact or footprint that you’re making in other parts of the country?
LF: We have a Google number [where people can] text or leave a voicemail [for free]. People from all over will call us from time to time. We have reached people even outside the United States, from the Caribbean and the UK. In fact, many of our YouTube followers are from the UK. But mostly, we get that information from social media: Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Part of Grapevine’s focus is to have credible and experienced messengers deliver trusted health information to underrepresented communities.
EH: Can you talk a bit about how you find the right messengers and who they are?
LF: Well, what I’ve found is that a lot of the Black doctors who work with us grew up in meager circumstances. So, I think a lot of this is lived experiences that translate to effective communication. Dr. Fabián [Sandoval] is our doctor who speaks Spanish. He’s very effective because he does research and keeps his finger on the pulse of health education and health issues that are impacting Black and brown communities. He has a TV show called Tu Salud Tu Familia (Your Health Your Family) on Telemundo, and he’s very relatable to the Hispanic community.
I pick these doctors myself if I’ve heard them communicating complex information to the public, or if I brought them out on the street with me or maybe observed them in a lecture or something. They all have a passion for plain speak and helping the community understand health information. But they also generally either have spent most of their careers working with underserved communities, or they’re from those communities themselves.
EH: What have been your biggest challenges and successes since you founded Grapevine Health?
LF: Some of the challenges have included marketing and consistently getting in front of the right audiences through social media. Identifying trust-based funders who are willing to partner but let us lead implementation of solutions based on our experiences and what the community has taught us has also been difficult. But some of my successes have been demonstrating how and why the messenger matters. We have delivered tailored messages and video content to Black and brown audiences and know our interventions have increased vaccine uptake in vaccine-hesitant folks by up to 35 percent. We now want to shift our focus to chronic health conditions that will assist in improving long-standing health outcomes.
EH: Speaking of the messenger, with the pandemic, it seems that trusting the messenger has been more important now than ever for underserved communities. I know you recently wrote an article for Forbes about the need for health providers to deliver medical information to patients in a nuanced way that is tailored specifically to their background and to their needs in order to help them better understand the how and the why of medicine. Essentially, the importance of what you just referred to as “plain speak.” Can you expand a little more on that and give an example of what this means and how you’ve been able to do this personally?
LF: I give lectures a lot about how we [medical providers] can better communicate health information to patients. I think the main thing is, we have to be creative about how we demonstrate that we’re listening. In the clinic, a patient will be very attuned to whether or not you’re paying attention to them or listening to them. There was a study done that showed doctors spend way more time talking than patients, which needs to be flipped. So, just being aware of that and having a spirit of openness when you approach people is really important, because they can sense that. If you ask them questions, do you let them talk?
I’ve asked people to help us understand how they decide if they can trust a healthcare provider. So many of them say, “Well, this doctor listens.” One lady said, “Well, my doctor, she’s always in a rush. I feel like I can’t ask questions because I don’t want to bother her, and she’s in such a hurry, and I can tell she’s in a hurry because she’ll move toward the door and put her hand on the door.” So, subtle things like this signal to patients that what we [doctors] have to do is more important than listening to them. The other thing is, we have to listen for cues and different things that we take for granted.
For example, I interviewed a gentleman about why he used the emergency room. I talked to him for over an hour before I figured out he couldn’t read. So think about how illiterate people get lost in the health system. Do you know how many portals you have to log into, how many forms you have to fill out to be seen, or to get a follow-up appointment? How frustrating it is if you can’t read and no one even recognizes it because you’ve become so adept at hiding your reading ability? You get lost in the system. But we can pick up on things like that when we listen and ask the right questions.
I was also doing an outreach event, and I asked this man to sign up for our newsletter, and he asked me to do it for him. So, I looked at him and asked if he was okay and then asked if he had trouble reading, and he indicated he did. If we [medical providers] ask, they will tell us, but they’re not going to always volunteer that information. So those are just a few examples. But there are many others. We just have to slow down, listen, and get information from people and let them feel like we’re there because of them, not the other way around.
EH: Based on your interactions and some of the feedback you’ve received from your patients and people in the community, what should white healthcare providers keep in mind on how to be the most effective when working with members of the Black community?
LF: Pay attention to body language and the subtle, nonverbal cues we may be sending people. Oftentimes, people feel rushed when we [doctors] are talking to them, and we may not be listening intently. They will sense this, and it impacts trust. We all have biases about the poor and underserved, and some have not been in their shoes. Take time to understand their challenges and why it might be difficult for them to adhere to instructions. Recognize when there is a need to improvise and be creative in developing a treatment or follow-up plan. As for engagement in the community, simply show up consistently and listen rather than fly in and fly out or believe you have the answers or understand based on what you’ve heard or seen in the media.
EH: What are your hopes and dreams going forward?
LF: I hope for Grapevine Health to become the go-to source for trusted, relatable, and science-driven health information for underserved Black and Hispanic communities.
[ad_2]
Source link
