Understanding Nutrition Labels Latest Vital Sign?

As health professionals, we often assume that our patients understand what we tell them and can read the information sheets we expect them to understand.

But surprisingly often, even in a country like Canada, this is not the case. Thus, there is an increasing movement to make the assessment of a patient’s ability to follow health care instructions part of any first-time medical assessment of any patient (From personal experience, I would even include people with higher secondary college or university degrees in this).

In fact, health literacy, defined as the ability to read, understand, and act on health information has now been designated a new vital sign – the assessment of which, may be as important as measuring blood pressure, heart rate, or temperature.

To patients, failure to understand and appropriately act on health information (e.g. appropriate use of prescription drugs, self-monitoring, following a diet plan, etc.) may be as dangerous and detrimental to health as having any of the other vital signs out of whack.

To address this issue, the Public Health Group of Pfizer Inc., has developed a bilingual (English and Spanish) screening tool that assesses basic literacy and numeracy skills and identifies patients at risk for low health literacy. The tool can be administered in a clinical setting in just three minutes and provides valid information about the patient’s ability to understand simple health information.

The test called The Newest Vital Sign (NVS) has been studied by health literacy experts at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and the University of North Carolina and is described in a paper published in the Annals of Family Medicine.

Interestingly, the test is based on a nutrition label from an ice cream container. Patients are given the label and then asked 6 questions about how they would interpret and act on the information contained on the label.

Patients can and should retain the label so they can refer to it while answering questions. It is not necessary to give the patient time to review the label before asking the questions. Rather, they will review the label as they are asked and answer the questions.

The questions are asked orally and the responses recorded by a health care provider on a score sheet, which contains the correct answers. Based on the number of correct responses, the health care provider can assess the patient’s health literacy level.

If the test results indicate a patient has limited health literacy skills, providers can resort to simple health communication techniques to help patients better understand their medical issues and follow instructions.

It may be a good idea to spend these three minutes in any health care encounter with a new patient prior to embarking on explaining even the simplest care plan (like keeping a food diary), no word of which the patient may actually understand.

AMS
Edmonton, Alberta

Weiss BD, Mays MZ, Martz W, Castro KM, DeWalt DA, Pignone MP, Mockbee J, & Hale FA (2005). Quick assessment of literacy in primary care: the newest vital sign. Annals of family medicine, 3 (6), 514-22 PMID: 16338915