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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

James Hyde, MA, SM, Department of Public Health and Family Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, 136 Harrison Ave., Boston, MA 02111, 617-636-3456, james.hyde@tufts.edu

The clinician's role focuses on the individual and most often begins with the failure of public health practice. Public health practice focuses on the population and through health promotion, disease prevention and health protection seeks to keep individuals out of the clinician's office. Both clinical and public health practice rely heavily on fostering and maintaining effective communication with individuals and with the population respectively.

An important goal of public health practice is to encourage people to engage in behaviors that will have a salutary impact on their health. Whether the focus of the intervention is changing dietary behavior, avoiding high risk sexual behavior, hand washing, or colorectal cancer screening these efforts all require the effective communication of information and often the teaching of skills.

Health literacy has been recognized as an important barrier in this critical communication pathway. Yet there appears to have been more emphasis on its importance in the clinical literature than in the public health literature. What do we know about the extent to which public health practitioners are addressing these important issues? How much of what we have learned in clinical practice about health literacy is transferable to public health practice? What should we be doing to ensure that we are producing public health professionals with the knowledge and skills to meet this important challenge?

Learning Objectives:

• Evaluate the relevance for public health of clinical approaches to health literacy improvement.
• Identify the types of health literacy training public health professionals need.
• Prioritize health literacy improvement strategies for public health practice.

Keywords: Health Literacy, Public Health Education

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No