What Others Are Doing
Welcome to "What Others Are Doing" a Web page designed to help you build your own health literacy efforts. Here are ideas and activities from other groups as well as links to useful information.
Joint Commission urges patients to take an active role
The Joint Commission's education campaign, Understanding Your Caregivers provides patients questions and answers that will help them better understand the care they receive. The campaign is part of their national patient safety Speak Up program which offers downloadable, easy-to-read brochures on issues such as preventing medication mistakes, avoiding wrong site surgery, and recovering after leaving the hospital.
IHA Annual Health Literacy Conference
The Institute for Healthcare Advancement holds an annual conference for health care professionals and educators to teach them about health literacy, the latest research, and how to improve their patient education.
AAFP Foundation Toolkit
The American Academy of Family Physicians Foundation developed a toolkit to help family physicians communicate more effectively with their patients who are at risk for low health literacy. The resources help patients better understand their medications, take more responsibility for their health care and use medications as prescribed.
Resources on universal health care symbols
The Hablamos Juntos Web site offers health organizations a new and innovative solution to help limited English speaking populations navigate health facilities - universal symbols for health care. The site is designed for health care facilities and graphic designers interested in learning about and using newly developed health care symbols for wayfinding programs.
CPHA health literacy
The Canadian Public Health Association (CPHA) health literacy website contains statistics, strategies, tools, and downloadable reports regarding Canada's health literacy.
NYNJ PHTC offers online training course
The New York-New Jersey Public Health Training Center (NYNJ PHTC) offers a free online training course titled "Health Literacy and Public Health". This course consists of two modules which demonstrate how the public's literacy skills affect interactions with medical and public health staff, and provide practical techniques for addressing literacy issues in spoken and written communications.
Medscape offers online CME/CE activity
An online CME/CE activity "Assuring Quality Care for People with Limited Health Literacy" is available through Medscape. Upon completion, participants will be able to define health literacy and review how limited health literacy may affect the quality of healthcare, examine the relationship between health literacy and patient safety, identify those communication skills and clinical interventions that may improve health communication for all patients, and review clinical care strategies that may improve care for those populations most vulnerable to the effects of limited health literacy.
HRSA offers free online health literacy training
"Unified Health Communication 101: Addressing Health Literacy, Cultural Competency, and Limited English Proficiency" is a free online learning experience designed to help health professionals improve their patient-communication skills, increase their awareness and knowledge of factors that affect their communication with patients, and implement patient-centered communication practices. The course, developed by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), comprises five modules and is estimated to take a total of 5 hours to complete. The course may be completed at the user's own pace and may be taken for credit (CEU/CE, CHES, CME, and CNE) or not for credit.
Patients prefer simplified advance directive over standard form
Patients prefer simplified advance directive over standard form
Research shows that a simplified advance directive written at a fifth-grade reading level, with graphics that reinforce the text, is overwhelming preferred and completed at a higher rate by patients at all literacy levels compared with a commonly available standard form written at a twelfth-grade level. Written advance directives are used by patients to document end-of-life treatment wishes, designate surrogate decision-makers, and promote discussion regarding treatment wishes. The simplified form can be downloaded free in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese. The finding is in a study that was partially supported by the AMA Foundation.
AHRQ Tools Help Pharmacies Better Serve Patients with Low Health Literacy
AHRQ Tools Help Pharmacies Better Serve Patients with Low Health Literacy
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) offers two tools to help pharmacies provide better quality services to people with limited health literacy. The tools are titled "Is Our Pharmacy Meeting Patients' Needs? A Pharmacy Health Literacy Assessment Tool User's Guide" and "Strategies to Improve Communication between Pharmacy Staff and Patients: A Training Program for Pharmacy Staff". The pharmacy assessment tool can help raise pharmacy staff awareness of health literacy issues, detect barriers that may prevent individuals with limited literacy skills from using and understanding health information provided by a pharmacy, and may help identify opportunities for improving services. The training program for pharmacy staff includes the use of explanatory slides and small group breakout discussions. Participants can role play using handouts before concluding with a question-and-answer session. Access the guide. A print copy may also be obtained by sending an e-mail. Access the training program.
ACP Foundation Health Literacy Solutions Site
The American College of Physicians (ACP) Foundation health literacy website contains information for their annual health communication conferences, medication labeling resources, diabetes guide, and links to other articles and resources.
Baby Basics Prenatal Health Literacy Program
The What To Expect Foundation, which takes its name from the bestselling pregnancy and parenting series, has created the Baby Basics Prenatal Health Literacy Program. The program provides evidence-based tools, training and technical assistance for health care systems and providers to help them better educate and engage underserved pregnant women by using health literacy and cultural competency techniques.
Tools to Communicate with Older Adults
The Administration on Aging and the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion of the US Department of Health and Human Services are pleased to provide health literacy tools online and in CD formats. These tools are designed to help aging professionals communicate effectively with older adults at all health literacy levels on issues such as long-term care, evidence-based disease prevention programs, and the CMS preventive health initiative My Health.My Medicare . For the CD format, please send an e-mail that states your name, organization name, mailing address, and whether you want to receive follow-up information on health literacy.
Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills is Available Online
Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills is Available Online
Originally published in 1996, Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills, 2nd edition by Doak, Doak and Root, is now available online and can be downloaded for free. This classic text in health literacy covers topics such as tests for literacy skills and assessments of the suitability of materials.
HRSA Health Literacy Site
The US Health Resources and Services Administration's (HRSA) health literacy website contains free and easy-to-read health brochures and information in various languages.
Easy-to-Read Booklets on Alzheimer's Disease, Memory Loss
Easy-to-Read Booklets on Alzheimer's Disease, Memory Loss
The National Institute on Aging, a component of the National Institutes of Health, offers two free booklets designed to help people with limited literacy skills learn about Alzheimer's disease and memory loss. In these easy-to-read booklets, the medical and technical language has been replaced by plain language, stories, photographs, and other features to help readers understand the content.
Quick Guide to Health Literacy
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a new reference for professionals interested in health literacy, the Quick Guide to Health Literacy. Combining evidence and best practice, the strategies discussed in the guide include improving the usability of health information and health services, building knowledge to improve health decision-making, and advocating for health literacy improvement. The action-oriented tools can be applied to health care delivery, policy, administration, and public communication and education activities. Along with these tools, the Quick Guide also contains a sample PowerPoint presentation on health literacy.
California Health Literacy Initivative
The California Health Literacy Initivative Web site provides a wealth of health literacy information and resources including materials that use statistics and information provided by the American Medical Association Foundation.
Improving health literacy starts with reliable, consumer-friendly health information
Whether you're a patient or a provider looking for health information on the Internet, it's often difficult to know which websites are good and which ones are not. Welcome to MedlinePlus, a goldmine of good health information from the world's largest medical library, the National Library of Medicine. Their information is updated daily and covers more than 700 diseases and conditions. There are also lists of hospitals and physicians, a medical encyclopedia and dictionary, health information in Spanish, information on prescription and nonprescription drugs, health information from the media, and links to thousands of clinical trials. There is no advertising on this site, nor does MedlinePlus endorse any company or product. Visit www.MedlinePlus.gov, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.
Newly published book on health literacy
Edited by Joanne G. Schwartzberg, MD, Understanding Health Literacy: Implications for Medicine and Public Health, is geared to help physicians and other health care professionals improve the quality of care they provide for patients. Discussion encompasses factors that determine individual health literacy, patient-provider communication, and the effect of low literacy outcomes.
Health literacy materials available in English, Arabic, Hmong and Somali
Supervised by the Minnesota Literacy Council and funded by a grant form the Minnesota Department of Education, Multi-Cultural Educational Services has created lessons and quizzes on how to read prescription and medical labels in English, Arabic, Hmong and Somali.
Training in health literacy and cultural compentency helps reduce health disparities
On February 7, MPRO, Michigan's Medicare Quality Improvement Organization, announced a 60 percent health disparities reduction for African-American seniors with diabetes in Wayne County due in part to physician training in health literacy and cultural compentency. The three largest health systems in Detroit have embraced a physician training that educates providers on how literacy and cultural impact health.
Building a health literacy program?
The University of Virginia has established a health literacy curriculum and invites others to visit online to learn how the program is structured. Three resources are offered:
- An outline showing how UVA created its curriculum, including a faculty development handbook, examples of written case used in the curriculum and other reference materials. An introductory health literacy lecture and examples of illustrations.
- Standardized patient cases are being added to the site in 2003. These cases will illustrate how to work with functionally illiterate patients and with interpreters for the deaf and for non-English speaking patients.
- An introductory health literacy lecture and examples of illustrations.
