Michele Abercrombie for NPR
toggle caption Michele Abercrombie for NPR
Last year, in her first year of medical school at Harvard, Pooja Chandrashekar recruited 175 multilingual health profession students from around the U.S. to create simple and accurate fact sheets about COVID-19 in 40 languages. Michele Abercrombie for NPR
When cases of COVID-19 began rising in Boston last spring, Pooja Chandrashekar, then a first year student at Harvard Medical School, worried that easy-to-understand information about the pandemic might not be available in the many languages spoken by clients of the Family Van, the health services and health literacy program where she was working at the time.
When cases of COVID-19 began rising in Boston last spring, Pooja Chandrasekhar, then a first year student at Harvard Medical School, worried that easy-to
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th grade level, making it too hard for millions of Americans to fully understand.
According to the review s authors, the content often exceeded recommendations for the number of words in a sentence, word size, and the use of difficult terms related to public health.
Instead of telling patients that following safety precautions can reduce food-borne disease transmission, publications that write about food safety should simply say follow these rules to avoid getting sick, a CDC guide to health literacy advises. Our fact sheets originally recommended that people call 911 if they noticed bluish lips or face, she says. Volunteers with her literacy project noted such guidance wasn t helpful for many people so they rewrote the language to more accurately describe this symptom of low oxygen levels as discolored lips or face, rather than bluish.
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