"Teach Back" Communication Can Keep You Out Of The Hospital


Image by mohamed Hassan

When certain patients “teach back” a doctor’s instructions, they’re more likely to stay out of the hospital, according to a new study.

In the study, people living with high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease—conditions that can result in hospital visits if not managed effectively at home or with a patient’s primary care doctor—saw double-digit drops in hospital admissions compared with patients who did not teach their instructions back to their health-care provider.

“For patients with these conditions, most of their care happens at home,” says Young-Rock Hong, a doctoral student in health services research at the University of Florida’s College of Public Health and Health Professions and lead author of the paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“Teach-back helps doctors identify what information patients are lacking, or what they misunderstood, so they can correct it.”


 Get The Latest By Email

Weekly Magazine Daily Inspiration

For the study, researchers looked at five years of nationwide health care data from the Longitudinal Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.

When doctors asked adults 18 and older with high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, asthma, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to repeat care instructions back in their own words, they were 15% less likely to be admitted to the hospital and 23% less likely to be repeatedly hospitalized.

“The idea is that better communication leads to better adherence to doctors’ instructions, which leads to better health outcomes.”

While other studies have looked at a single disease or patients at a single hospital, this is the first nationally representative study to show how teach-backs can help people with these conditions manage their health without expensive, inconvenient hospital visits.

But the study also reveals a troubling statistic: Nearly a third of the 14,110 patients said their doctors had never asked them to teach back. That didn’t surprise coauthor Carla Fisher, a researcher in the College of Journalism and Communications who studies health communication. But if your doctor doesn’t ask you to teach back, you can initiate it on your own, she says.

“It’s a very helpful communication strategy for patients to initiate if a provider does not. It’s certainly one I use in my own health care as a patient, but probably even more in my role as a caregiver or care partner for my children and spouse.”

What’s preventing doctors from encouraging patients to repeat home care instructions in their own words? Time could factor in, Hong says, despite the fact that a teach-back can be done in just two to five minutes. He plans to look further into barriers to teach-back in the next phase of his research, as well as teasing out exactly how the method works to reduce hospitalization.

“The idea is that better communication leads to better adherence to doctors’ instructions, which leads to better health outcomes,” Hong says.

Physicians should initiate teach-back interactions with each patient they see, says coauthor Michelle Cardelle. “It only takes a moment and can have significant ramifications for the health outcomes of the patient.”

About the Authors

Additional coauthors are from the University of Texas, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the University of Alabama.

Original Study

More By This Author

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES

English Afrikaans Arabic Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Danish Dutch Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Malay Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

follow InnerSelf on

facebook icontwitter iconyoutube iconinstagram iconpintrest iconrss icon

 Get The Latest By Email

Weekly Magazine Daily Inspiration

Wednesday, 19 May 2021 08:07

For many people, the thing they’ve missed most during the pandemic is being able to hug loved ones. Indeed, it wasn’t until we lost our ability to hug friends and family did many realise just how...

Thursday, 13 May 2021 08:34

Iron deficiency is a common nutritional disorder worldwide, and pre-menopausal women are most at risk of being diagnosed with it.

Thursday, 15 April 2021 07:13

As a species, humans are wired to collaborate. That’s why lockdowns and remote work have felt difficult for many of us during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Friday, 14 May 2021 16:24

The chakras set the frequencies that give rise to every aspect of the human experience. The foods we eat have consciousness and provide an energetic blueprint that stabilizes and entrains...

Friday, 28 July 2023 17:45

Respiratory viruses like influenza virus (flu), SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) can make us sick by infecting our respiratory system, including the nose, upper...

Sunday, 02 May 2021 08:18

When you think about soil, you probably think of rolling fields of countryside. But what about urban soil? With city dwellers expected to account for 68% of the world’s population by 2050, this oft...

New Attitudes - New Possibilities

InnerSelf.comClimateImpactNews.com | InnerPower.net
MightyNatural.com | WholisticPolitics.com | InnerSelf Market
Copyright ©1985 - 2021 InnerSelf Publications. All Rights Reserved.