The Day You’ve Been Waiting For: Registration Is Open!

If you’re like most AMWA members, you’ve already pored over the 2013 AMWA Annual Conference registration brochure and carefully planned what you want to take. This workshop, that roundtable. It’s fun thinking about how much you can fit into 3.5 days, isn’t it? Now it’s time to take that next step and register—registration opens today, July 10, at 3 PM (ET)!

If you haven’t looked at the registration brochure, what are you waiting for? The AMWA Annual Conference is the educational event for medical communicators everywhere. Whether you write for the pharmaceutical or medical device industry, lay audiences, or health care professionals, you will enhance your knowledge and practical skills at the AMWA annual conference. And talk about networking! You will be able to attend five—yes, five—networking events with food—all included in the price of registration. Not confident in your networking abilities? Four sessions on networking are offered on Thursday and Friday to help you improve your networking skills. Each session is a different format, so you can pick the one that best fits your needs. Or go to all of them and be a master networker by Saturday!

Another special feature of the conference is the line-up of invited speakers, most notably, the recipients of the AMWA Alvarez and McGovern awards: Gregory D. Curfman, MD, Executive Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and Cynthia Baur, PhD, Senior Advisor for Health Literacy, Office of the Associate Director for Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You can learn more about these two leading authorities in the registration brochure. And there’s nothing to keep you from hearing their award lectures-—no programming competes with the lecture sessions, and again, they’re free!

The outstanding educational program, networking events, and award-winning speakers make the AMWA Annual Conference an exceptional value. If you don’t believe me, check out the materials on the AMWA website that highlight the value of the conference. If you’re a freelance, learn how the annual conference is the best business decision you’ll make this year. If you don’t work for yourself, you can customize a memo to your boss to help gain financial support to attend. Just visit the annual conference page on the AMWA website and click on “Committing to the AMWA Annual Conference.”

If you missed news about the conference in the June issue of the AMWA Journal, this year’s Annual Conference offers a variety of new features as well as the return of some popular events. For example, among the new session formats is the Hands-on Demonstration, where you learn as you follow along on your own laptop or mobile device.

Success Stories in Health Literacy (Open Session 35)

Why do we have to struggle to further health literacy, when the future of health care seems such an important issue today? Why don’t people just embrace it? Those were the questions that panel member Delores Isham-Colvard, PhD, RN posed in the first presentation of this open session. Jane Krauhs, PhD, moderated the panel of three persons who shared their success stories; in them we find tools for improving our own efforts.

Isham-Colvard, manager of Patient Communication at Children’s Hospital, Dallas, noted that the costs of failing to promote health literacy are high, with communication failures at the root of so many problems, including legal liability, in health care. As far as getting others involved in health literacy, first, she says, “put your face out there.” Get on committees. Here, she told her own “Saga of Pee and Poop” and her experience with her hospital administration who strongly preferred using “urination” or “making water” in brochures. Using words that patients, and especially children, understand is not dumbing down. Writing at the literacy level of most Americans—the 5th or 6th grade level—only makes sense. We should write for our audience.

Shirin Pestonjee, MS, RN, reinforced Isham-Colvard's point. Pestonjee is a patient education specialist at Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas. Surveys taken in 1988 and 1998 attest to the success of the Parkland program, which begins with an orientation of new employees. She points out from the very beginning, employees are encouraged to use words that patients understand, like… “pee in the cup,” not “void in the cup.” Many health professionals want to talk at higher reading levels; they are either unaware and can’t grasp the scope of levels, or fear that patients will feel “talked down to.” She gave the example of a fancy packaged system of health information that the employees, after they came to an understanding of literacy levels, rejected—because the reading was at a 12th grade level.