Health Care and Mental Health

Patients use the Right Question Strategy to:

• Be more effective problem solvers
  
• Advocate for themselves
  
• Navigate the health care system
  
• Participate more effectively in decision-making processes
  
• Hold decision-makers accountable

The Right Question Institute’s methods and specific health care curriculum help patients take greater ownership of their own health care and partner more effectively with their health care providers. Health educators, nurses, doctors, counselors and support staff can use the Right Question Strategy to:

• Teach patients how to generate and prioritize their questions
• Encourage reluctant and hesitant patients to ask their questions
• Support patient efforts to participate more actively in their own health care
• Promote more patient-provider shared decision-making

Partners

RQI’s work with Dr. Margarita Alegria (Harvard Medical School) and the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research (CMMHR) offered a remarkable demonstration of the universal relevance of RQI’s methods. In a NIH-funded study, CMMHR tested the effectiveness of teaching RQI’s methods to  primarily Latino patients at a community mental health center. The results were striking.  Levels of patient activation and engagement were two and three times the rate of comparison patients.  One patient said: I learned that I should be more confident with my doctors, that I can ask any kind of question about my problem and treatment and not be ashamed. Another patient said that learning RQI helps shy people - I can ask questions that I wasn't able to ask before (I would be too embarassed). The results of this study are presented in the medical journal, Medical Care, March 2008. CMMHR has expanded the rigorous, randomized study to include six sites around the country.

The Right Question Strategy is the core educational component of an innovative pilot project in medical education and patient activation with Dr. Marthe Gold and Dr. Darwin Deen at the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Sciences at the City College of New York.  Medical students were trained to teach the RQI Strategy to patients in waiting rooms in community health centers in the Bronx and Brooklyn. One of the students observed: I did not realize the extent to which patients can be inactive... Activating patients can be done in the waiting area and the time they wait can be used in a productive manner. Another student said that the patients gained the confidence to ensure that the questions they ask their physician are answered and that they leave the visit not only satisfied but able to understand what was discussed. Inital results are very promising and point to the robustness, simplicity and power of the RQ Strategy.

Learn more about our work in health care and how to access the Right Question Strategy from our resources page.

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