Lay health educators' roles in improving patient education.

here is an urgent need to transform our health care system to improve the quality of and access to care, more efficiently use limited resources, and be more cost effective. The convergence of trends, many studied by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine, driving this need for transformation include the alarming increase in chronic diseases across the lifespan, persistent shortages of health care professionals and interpreters, the increasing uninsured population, and limitations of our health care safety net to meet growing demands. Demographic changes, environmental health risks, and health literacy issues further compound these problems. All these factors contribute to health disparities and underscore the need for culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate health education and care. A key to health care transformation is the shift from a traditional hierarchical, clinician-centered