Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.1 Nearly half of U.S. adults read between a 7th- and 8th-grade reading level, but health information is often delivered at a 10th-grade level or higher.2
October is Health Literacy Month, an excellent opportunity to assess what your department can do to make health materials more accessible. These resources are a few of our favorites for improving communication with patients and staying current on health literacy best practices.
- Sydney Health Literacy Lab’s Health Literacy Editor – This free editor is a great tool to check your writing for health literacy guidelines. The tool can highlight complex or uncommon words with simpler alternatives. It can also identify complicated sentences and sentences written in passive voice.
- Health Literacy Online – As more health information moves online, it’s essential to ensure websites are accessible and simple for patients and research participants. This guide from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion aims to broaden access to user-friendly health information and services on the web. It includes best practices for creating search functions, organizing content, writing for the web, developing mobile sites, and more.
- We Heart Health Literacy – This is one of our favorite newsletters to get in our inbox. CommunicateHealth sends a short weekly email with one easy step to improve communication. We enjoyed this recent post, “What to Say About Weight.”
- Institute for Healthcare Advancement’s Health Literacy Solutions Community – Do you have a health literacy-related question and want feedback from health literacy experts? Would you like to connect with others interested in health literacy? The Institute for Healthcare Advancement’s (IHA) community list allows you to ask questions and stay informed about what others are doing. The community is free to join, but you do have to create a user account. In addition, IHA hosts an annual health literacy conference featuring workshops and sessions on putting health literacy into practice.
- The Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard is hosting a Health Literacy Month Webinar Series open to all during October. The series includes the following webinars: October 10: Impactful Informed Consent Processes that Empower Participants; October 17: Creating and Sharing Plain Language Summaries: One Team’s Experience; and October 22: PowerPoint Presentations to Support Health Literacy and Accessibility.
Check out these health literacy and communication blog posts for more resources and best practices. You can also contact Plain Language Review Service at Becker Library for assistance reviewing and editing your documents for readability and plain language.
Sources:
- Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (n.d.). Social determinants of health. Healthy People 2030. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/social-determinants-health ↩︎
- National Center for Education Statistics. (2002). Adult literacy in America. (NCES Publication No. 1993-275). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. ↩︎