Play › Inspiring stories

Your Future Health - Is it a good idea to know your risks?

By bdisciThu, 06/01/2011 - 14:06

Adult Learners Decide-ing

Your Future Health - Is it a good idea to know your risks?

There's no denying that from a medical point of view, if a person can identify their health risks and take steps to minimize them, they may never suffer a serious medical event like a heart attack. This is good for the patient and for the health service. However, there is a lot involved in understanding health risks. We wanted to know what people thought about health risks for two important medical conditions - heart disease and diabetes. There is much in the media about risk factors and steps that can be taken to reduce risk, but is this information helpful or does it lead to confusion?

We adapted a Decide kit to tackle this issue. We were working with a group of Adult Learners with low literacy levels so we chose to use multimedia elements, such as a TV ad and a radio clip, to spark discussion in place of more traditional story cards. We hoped that these new 'real-life' elements would spark discussion in the group and help to tease out some of the issues around understanding health risks.

We found that the groups had plenty of opinions to express and through the event, a wide range of views were revealed. The consensus amongst the groups we worked with was that while it is a good idea to know your risk factors, what this means to a person's day-to-day life should be clearly explained by a health professional (e.g. reducing high cholesterol levels).

The multimedia elements were a novel way to introduce the topics and helped to provide a real world context for the discussion.

Related project
Project: 
Health & Diagnostic Testing for Adult Learners
Authors/organizers: 

The event was organized by the Education & Outreach team of the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute. Engagement with local public groups on health topics of personal relevance is an element of our Education programme, and Decide provided a very useful tool to facilitate this. We adapted Decide to focus on the topic of Health Risks and what that means to people. We asked the question - is it a good idea to know your risks?

Events: 
The events were held for groups of adults who had returned to education as mature students. The courses they were attending ranged from Basic Education (e.g. to improve reading and writing skills) to an Introduction to Nursing for students interested in pursuing further studies in this area. We consulted with the course co-ordinators during the development of new material, and they selected students to attend the events. We were delighted with the level of engagement the participants had with Decide. There was plenty of discussion amongst the group and everyone expressed their opinions on the topics. We had adapted the story card format to include video and radio clips and a newspaper article and these 'real-world' examples seemed to strike a chord with participants. One alteration we would make when running it again would be group size. We had approx. 10 participants in one large group which made it harder for some people to express their views as there were so many other voices. A group of 6 might work better.
Follow up: 

We had an evaluator attend our events to observe the events and evaluate the new story card elements. We will use her observations to prepare for future events. For example, one new element was a radio clip on health screening. The clip introduced a large number of medical conditions and the discussion that followed was wide-ranging. Suggestions for improvement were to shorten the clip so that only one or two conditions are highlighted, or for the facilitator to steer the conversation towards the topics of primary interest (e.g. heart disease and diabetes)

We plan to use the Decide kit again as part of our Public Engagement programme.

1 Comment

Leave a Response

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

I am one of the million of

RamonA (not verified) on Wed, 15/06/2011 - 07:43

I am one of the million of people who seeks a healthy body. It is indeed a great favor to read this article as to prepare for my future health. In this way, I be able to save for my personal loans in preventing health problems which prior to my fear in caner problems. I guess, the most important about this is bringing up and proper knowledge to prevent the disease rather than to cure it.