ADEAR's Alzheimer's Disease Library

The ADEAR (Alzheimer's Disease Education & Referral) Center has launched the Alzheimer's Disease (AD) Library or AD Lib, with a new online interface for searching an extensive collection of health literature on AD.

AD Lib is fully searchable and integrates the AD Thesaurus of over 2,000 index terms that searchers can use to browse the collection.

Users also have access to frequently searched topics and other AD health information databases.
The AD Lib collection includes nearly 8,500 fact sheets, books, textbook chapters, journal articles, brochures, teaching manuals, directories, videos and other media, bibliographies, program descriptions, monographs, newsletters, and reports that are available from a wide variety of sources.

Medication Safety Brochure

In preparation for Health Literacy month in October, "Patient Education Matters!" will focus on two health literacy-related resources per month. Today we focus on a new brochure for consumers entitled "Your Medicine: Play it Safe". This publication suggests four ways to ensure safe use and management of medication. Also included is a medicine record form to help track medicines, vitamins and other dietary supplements that includes handy columns such as: "name and strength of medicine", color, "what it is for", "date began taking", "how much to take and when" and "do not take with". Other forms include reminders about what questions to ask before taking medications and a template for recording doctors and pharmacies.

Produced by the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, this 17-page brochure in English, is available free of charge in .pdf format. In addition, up to 10 print brochures can be ordered free of charge from AHQR.

Talking with Children About School Violence

The reliable resource KidsHealth.org has released tips for parents seeking to reassure their children after the most recent episode of school violence. Although school violence is rare (fewer than 1% of homicides occur on school grounds or on the way to or from school), the authors provide valuable suggestions such as:

Share your own feelings
Start the conversation
Tell them in concrete terms what will be done to make them feel safe
Be truthful about the news but do not go in to more detail than your child wants to know or can absorb
Carefully monitor exposure to violence over the television - if necessary, turn it off

Culturally Competent Care Quiz

Delve into your inner cultural competence by taking the Provider's Guide to Quality & Culture Quiz on a new website dedicated to assisting healthcare organizations in providing quality, culturally competent care to multi-ethnic populations. The Quality & Culture Quiz asks 23 thought-provoking questions intended to get you thinking about culturally-competent care.

What would your responses to the following sample questions?
Some symbols-a positive nod of the head, a pointing finger, a "thumbs-up" sign-are universal and can help bridge the language gap.

When a provider expects that a patient will understand a condition and follow a regimen, the patient is more likely to do so than if the provider has doubts about the patient.

Minority and immigrant patients in the US who go to traditional healers and use traditional medicines generally avoid conventional Western treatments.

Folic Acid Brochure for New Moms

"Congratulations, Mom. You Have a Beautiful Baby" explains why folic acid is important even after childbirth and reminds new mothers to take a multivitamin with folic acid every day. The brochure, produced by the National Birth Defects Prevention Network, is targeted to postpartum women. Tips on postpartum self-care, such as getting enough rest; finding time to relax; and eating a healthy, varied diet, are presented. Content is appropriate for use in a variety of settings, including hospitals, obstetric and pediatric offices, and family planning and WIC programs.

This full-color brochure in .PDF format is available in English and in Spanish.

Research Tools for English and Spanish Speakers

It's not often that you are told a research scale may be used "at no cost without permission" but thanks to the Stanford Patient Education Research Center (SPERC) and their funding from the National Institute of Nursing Research, over 30 scales have been made available to you at no cost and without permission!

The SPERC scales were developed, adapted or used by the staff of the SPERC who, over the past 24 years have developed, tested, and evaluated self-management programs for English and Spanish speakers with chronic health problems. Among their projects have been the evaluation tools available in both English and Spanish and they have made them extremely accessible. Via their website, SPERC gives you the items, their properties (if available), and coding and scoring instructions. They are also available as downloadable PDF files (using the PDF link at the bottom of each page). The tools are divided into six categories: Self management behaviors, self-efficacy, health status, health care utilization, education, and diabetes-specific scales. Instruments include "Arthritis Self-Efficacy", "Eating Breakfast with Protein", Visits to Providers", and "Shortness of Breath Visual Numeric".

Although these instruments are available to you free and without permission, do not neglect to give credit to SPERC when utilizing these tools.

Child Neglect, Diverse Patient Populations

A Joint Commission publication entitled "Hospitals, Language, and Culture: A Snapshot of the Nation" is a study "designed to provide a snapshot of how sixty hospitals across the country are providing health care to culturally and linguistically diverse patient populations." Among other important findings, analysis of the data "revealed three principal areas worthy of highlight because of their importance to patient safety. These included the provision of language services, the process for obtaining informed consent, and the collection and use of patient-level demographic data."

Clinical Trials Education Series

Do you educate peers, cancer patients, or community groups?

Do you want to learn more about clinical trials?

Do you have an interest in becoming a trial investigator?

Then you should consider the National Cancer Institute’s Clinical Trials Education Series to help you. CTES is a collection of more than 20 multimedia resources to educate cancer patients, health care professionals, advocates, and the general public about cancer prevention and treatment clinical trials.

The series contains materials in several formats, all of which can be adapted to fit your needs:
- Workbooks
- Resource and training manuals
- Slide presentations
- Booklets and brochures
- Videos

The series includes Spanish language resources, easy-to-read materials, and a Web-based course for health care professionals. To order FREE materials, call 1-800-4-CANCER or download them for free. Slide presentations and print materials are also available on a CD, which can be ordered from the Web site.

Multilingual Consumer Health Languages, Pediatric Education

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), in cooperation with the Consumer Outreach Librarians, has compiled a webliography of consumer health resources in a variety of languages.

If you have an interest in pediatric patient and family education, Partners in Pediatric Education (P.I.P.E) may be the group for you! In its third year, P.I.P.E., a partner of the Health Care Education Association (HCEA), "is a national forum comprised of dedicated interdisciplinary pediatric educators who work cooperatively to help improve healthcare education in the field of pediatrics."

Welcome to the Patient Education Matters! Blog!

"Patient Education Matters!" a bi-weekly e-newsletter provided as a service of Inova Fairfax Health Sciences Library for the staff of Inova Fairfax Hospital has just hit its 20th edition mark. What to do with all those back issues and valuable links we have provided week after week? This blog will organize our original posts in abridged format and will be updated every two weeks in conjunction with the e-newsletter. In addition, more timely "special supplements" will be posted here.

We hope you enjoy this blog and we welcome your comments.

The Staff of "Patient Education Matters!"