Improving Americans’ health literacy

January 2011 — Why do hospitals have signs for the “nephrology department” when patients with kidney disease who need that department’s services are unlikely to know what the word nephrology means?

Rima Rudd, senior lecturer on society, human development, and health, talks about the importance of getting all in the patient care industry more tuned in to the issues of health literacy, the topic of her recent perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine. (2:02)

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