What does health equity mean to you in your professional and personal lives? In this episode, you'll learn 14 ways to help you find out.

Health equity is still on people's minds, and I am here for it! Maybe you can define health equity. But what does it mean to you? In this episode, you'll learn 14 ways to help you find out.

Hi everybody. I'm Dr. Anne Marie Liebel. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners, an independent health-equity focused education and communication consultancy. If your organization needs expert help with any topic in this series, visit healthcommunicationpartners.com.

Today's episode sponsored by Maven Roth Group. Maven Roth is a progressively strong, women-owned creative agency. From designing images, reports, logos, templates, and social graphics for your organization, to spreading the word thru digital, print, billboards, radio and television, Maven Roth has you covered, all the way to media buying and management. Visit mavenroth.com today.

This episode, like every episode, is about a problem or a question that's emerging in the health sector that relates to health communication, or patient education or health literacy. I'm in a lot of conversations right now, people like you are writing to me, and a common thread continues to be health equity. I was just at another virtual health equity conference this week. And I think health equity relates to health communication, and health literacy and patient education in some pretty complicated ways. I also am concerned about the meaning of the term health equity' because when a term becomes so popular, it risks becoming meaningless or co=opted. I know you know this, we did a prior episode on the definition of health equity and I'll put the link in the notes. so I thought the time was right to offer  some reflective questions about health equity.

Because we are, as professionals, still asking hard questions of ourselves about what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, who we are to do this work.  It is this kind of critical reflection and action that Health Communication Partners was built on, and built for.

Now, reflective practice is a broad umbrella term, I want to get that out of the way right up front. There's many different understandings of and approaches to reflection and to practice, right?

I have been engaging in reflective practice for about 17 years, specifically a form of reflective practice created by my mentor Susan Lytle and her longtime collaborator and friend Marilyn Cochran-Smith. I believe reflective practice invites you to look at what you're already doing, to get at your taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions beneath your words and actions. We don't often get a chance to think about our assumptions or articulate them to ourselves, let alone to other people. But when we do, we can begin to see places where we're not living up to our own standards as well as some opportunities to do better.

I'm serious about the action part. This isn't only about sitting and thinking and discussing, although it is about that. I want to share one of my favorite quotes from Donald Schön, whose highly-influential books The Reflective Practitioner and Educating the Reflective Practitioner describe and analyze what he calls reflection-in-action . This quote's from Educating the Reflective Practitioner, and he explains why reflection-in-action is important:

[T]he problems of real-world practice do not present themselves to practitioners as well-formed structures.  Indeed, they tend not to present themselves as problems at all but as messy, indeterminate situations . Often, situations are problematic in several ways at once . These indeterminate zones of practice uncertainty, uniqueness, and value conflict escape the canons of technical rationality.  It is just these indeterminate zones of practice, however, that practitioners and critical observers of the professions have come to see with increasing clarity over the past two decades as central to professional practice.  (p. 4)

So I'm wondering, what's the situation with health equity? It's an indeterminate, messy situation right now! What I want to share here is a key tool in reflective practice: questioning or problem-posing as a way to begin to investigate and address the problems of real-world practice.'

Why ask hard questions? It's because this kind of interrogation is part of the traditions that I come from. It's part of what it means to me to take what I call a critical health stance. I believe that any equity-oriented approach to the work that we do, to health communication, health literacy, and patient education research, theory, practice, policy it all necessarily involves our using terminology, our using discourses, and our engaging in practices that are themselves grounded in equity and justice. And we can find out if that grounding is there by starting to ask some hard, reflective questions.

I'm going to give you fourteen prompts that you can ask yourself when you want to engage in some critical reflection. These questions are designed to get at your taken-for-granted beliefs. The things that we don't typically get down to.

And then, we turn explicitly to action. Because after each, there always is a follow-up question: what implications does your answer have for your practice?  In other words, why might this matter to you and your work with patients, clients, students, or the public?

Again, the important question at the end of each of these is always: what implications does this have for my practice?  

Reflection, the way I practice it, is designed to press in to the stress and messiness of practice not deny it. Ideally, reflective practice isn't something that you do just once in a while. It's a practice,  it's constant. So I encourage you: don't do this alone.

Whether you reflect with others, or alone in your thoughts, intentional and systematic reflection is a powerful tool. It invites us as professionals to imagine other possible practices, roles, and relationships. Which means it's ideal for those of us deeply committed to health equity, and entirely uninterested in going back to normal.

This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music by Joe Liebel. I'm Dr. Anne Marie Liebel.

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