Medication Literacy And Medication Decision Making Among Older Adults
While health literacy is widely understood as a quality measure of health care decision making, another related measure calls for increased attention, particularly regarding older adults: medication literacy. While researchers have developed several medication literacy measures, they neither have received broad validation nor enjoyed wide application. A report from AARP indicates that understanding the broader category of health literacy may be the first step to understanding medication literacy among older Americans. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), 36% of American adults have limited health literacy skills, meaning that an individual has basic or below basic skills to perform simple and everyday literacy activities, such as reading and understanding information in simple documents or locating numbers and using them to solve simple, one-step problems. Older adults have the highest rates of low health literacy among all age groups: 59% of individuals ages 65 and older had basic or below basic health literacy levels and have significantly lower rates of both proficient (3%) and intermediate (38%) levels of health literacy. Today, 86% of adults in that age group take at least one prescription medication, while 42% take five or more drugs, with the average Medicare beneficiary taking 4.6 prescriptions per month. Additional information can be obtained in the report here.
Lessons Learned In Health Professions Education During The COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic arguably was the greatest disrupter health professional education (HPE) has ever experienced. To explore how lessons learned from this unprecedented event could inform the future of HPE, the Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop series in 2020 and 2021. The first workshop focused on identifying challenges faced by educators, administrators, and students amidst the pandemic and how the different stakeholder groups shifted and adapted in response. The second workshop explored how experts from various health professions might respond to hypothetical, but realistic future world situations having an impact on HPE. The final two workshops contemplated the future of HPE post-COVID and explored next steps for applying lessons learned from the workshop series to allow educators to test and evaluate educational innovations in real time. The Proceedings of a Workshop summarizes discussions from the second, third, and fourth workshops in this series and can be obtained here.
Organizing Shared Equity Leadership
Even after decades of programmatic efforts and interventions, institutions continue to struggle to find ways to make a difference in the success of racially minoritized, low-income, and first-generation students, whose populations are increasing on college campuses. Higher education remains inequitable, and most institutions have not made the transformational changes necessary to create truly inclusive environments and equitable outcomes for students. A critical component to realize such transformation is the role of institutional leadership at all levels. Few guidelines exist, however, for higher education leaders who want to scale deep, meaningful, and lasting change to the policies, practices, and structures that have long sustained inequity on their campuses and in the higher education system at large. The American Council on Education (ACE) and the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California (USC) formed a partnership to conduct a study of shared equity leadership team structures. This effort benefits the higher education sector by filling a critical gap, providing a fuller understanding of what it means when leaders share leadership in service of equity goals. This project consisted of semi-structured interviews with groups of leaders at four institutions representing different institutional types, contexts, and regions, making it possible to learn more about shared equity leadership and the structures that support it. The report can be obtained here.