Through the evidence appraisal and synthesis, I learned that using culturally congruent images in patient education is almost always the right move in terms of improving outcomes. Before starting this project, I would have assumed that using images that depicts members of the community you’re trying to treat would always be the right decision but I learned that wasn’t always the case. One of the research articles mentioned that if you were trying to help educate a patient about changing a behavior, say around smoking, it isn’t always best practice to use only members of that patient’s ethnic/racial group. While the images do help the patient to identify with the message, we don’t want it to seem that one ethnic group is the only group of people who have a problem smoking. The same could be said about helping patients cut down on drinking or teen pregnancy. We don’t want it to seem like we’re singling out a group of people based off of their race. From the other literature, it seems this doesn’t apply as directly with diet and exercise education.
I think this project will help me in my future be more aware of the choices in printed education that I give out. I think it can be easy just to use UptoDate or whatever basic template your organization uses without giving much thought to the racial/ethnic considerations involved in using that media. I will be more conscious in looking over all the information through a lens of cultural care. Members of the healthcare team can get into the habit of not thinking critically about patient education because they think they already know the information and don’t consider it as a tool for continued care outside of the clinic.
My group and I arrived at similar conclusion. I think we worked well together with getting the assignments done and doing equitable shares of the work. We work well by figuring out who is doing which section first and then figuring out when we want to do it. Especially as we’ve gotten later into the semester, not everyone can work on the same days. Although we try and meet and members of our groups house during the scheduled class time so we can bounce ideas off each other, once or twice we broke up and worked on it throughout the week in order to keep stress down regarding other assignments and exams. But even on those week we still collaborated, for example, me and Julia were on the phone for about 40 minutes working on the appraisals for our projects because we value each other’s feedback. I also called Faith just to make sure everything was all set. I think the four of us all know and trust each other well enough not need to babysit one another to get work done all at the same time. I think it is one of our best strengths.
