Journal of the American Pharmacists Association
Tools For Advancing Pharmacy PracticePromoting health communication between the community-dwelling well-elderly and pharmacists: The Ask Me 3 program
Section snippets
Objective
To date, no reports have been published in the peer-reviewed literature on the effectiveness of the Ask Me 3 program in promoting patients' use of the principles of clear health communication with their pharmacist. Therefore, this study sought to evaluate the impact of a live Ask Me 3 educational program on participants' readiness to use the seven principles of clear health communication when communicating with their pharmacist. A sample of community-dwelling well-elderly participants from Polk
Methods
Using available Ask Me 3 educational materials from the Partnership for Clear Health Communication,9,10 a standardized presentation focusing on clear health communication was provided on 12 separate occasions to community-dwelling well-elderly participants in Polk County, IA, by study investigators (M.J.M. and M.A.C.). The presentation explained barriers to health communication and offered recommendations to improve health communication using the principles of the Ask Me 3 program. For this
Background characteristics
Data were collected on 118 participants. Four participants were excluded due to ineligibility or protocol deviations. Eight participants did not report regular medication use and therefore were not included in the final analytical sample of 106.
The overall study sample had a mean (±SD) age of 75.1 ± years, was predominantly women (67.0%) and white (77.5%), had an income of $25,000 or less (72.5%), and had at least a high school education or equivalent (80.2%) (Table 1).
A majority of participants
Discussion
Findings from the first reported evaluation of the Ask Me 3 program in the pharmacy-relevant environment are reported here. The only other published evaluation of the Ask Me 3 program was reported in a Hispanic pediatric outpatient practice, in which 41.5% (n = 163 of 393) of patients reported hearing about the Ask Me 3 program and, of those, 50.3% (n = 82 of 163) reported using the program 6 months after implementation, which equated to an overall usage rate of approximately 20.9% (n = 82 of
Limitations
Practical evaluation studies in realistic settings often pose considerable obstacles and threats to internal validity. Measurement concerns, sample size accrual, and generalizability can also be problematic.
In this study, a modified pretest–posttest design was used to mitigate three key threats to internal validity.14 The one sample pretest–posttest analysis controlled only for selection and mortality concerns, while the separate sample pretest–posttest analyses controlled for pretest
Conclusion
The Ask Me 3 program is a practical tool used to create awareness and reinforce principles of clear health communication. A comprehensive effort should be made to further expand the evaluation of the Ask Me 3 program in diverse pharmacy and health care settings with patients at high risk for poor health communication.
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Disclosure: Dr. Abrams has received support from Wellmark Foundation to implement the Ask Me 3 program at the Iowa Health System and has received an unrestricted educational grant as a Pfizer Visiting Professorship in Health Literacy/Clear Health Communication. The other authors declare no conflicts of interest or financial interests in any product or service mentioned in this article, including grants, employment, gifts, stock holdings, or honoraria.
Funding: Polk County Senior Services provided $10 gift cards to study participants.
Previous presentation: Presented in part at the American Pharmacists Association Annual Meeting and Exposition, March 16–19, 2007, Atlanta, GA.