“Public Health information directed at providers doesn’t tend to take their backgrounds into account.”
This past Spring, recent UF graduate Alex Pilcher, MPH., completed a project with the Anaclerio Learning and Assessment Center that focused on guiding the patient – provider communication skills of current medical students.
While working closely with Dr. Briana Tierno and Dr. Ashleigh Wright, as well as one of CELS’s Standardized Patients, Pilcher succeeded at their goal of creating and producing a visual aide detailing how providers might communicate with their patients. The goal was to film a video that medical students could reference in preparation for their Standardized Patient encounters.
Pilcher’s main focus is increasing the effectiveness of the dissemination of public health information to providers. Pilcher stated, “There’s not a lot of communication beyond strictly professional. Communication can also be facilitated and created by staff that may not have the best understanding of what will make the information most useful to physicians. Public health information directed at providers doesn’t tend to take their background into account.”
Often times, public health information is made available to providers via health department newsletters, CDC page updates, and newly published studies. In Pilcher’s opinion, there are times where the information outside of these modes does not make their way to physicians. Therefore, physicians primarily stay up to date through continuing education programs, which may limit what newly available information is learned, given the scope of the course. Additionally, Pilcher feels that provider burnout, high patient quotas, and patient notes and charting contributes to a limited amount of work and free time physicians have to stay up to date with new developments.
The question is, how do public health experts combat this?
Healthcare provider education is a tool that experts can use, in Pilcher’s opinion, to increase providers’ awareness of public health research, standards, and to encourage good habits.
“New medical students focus heavily on getting the practical aspects of care correctly, such as performing physical exams or asking the correct screening questions – which is important for them to learn for the purposes of patient care and diagnoses. But often when perfecting these practical skills, they push their soft skill development to the sidelines.” Pilcher states. Pilcher’s project utilized the PEARLS method as an effort to give students the material to work on said ‘soft skills’ outside of direct feedback. Having a repository where more short-form content is available to physicians or medical students, in digestible ‘nuggets’ of important information, is a reasonable step in increasing the effectiveness in disseminating public health information.
This is only the first of many steps in Pilcher’s journey to advocating for an improved physician-patient relationship, that increases patient engagement and improves quality of care.