Health Literacy and Healthy Homes: A Call to Action

Working to improve health literacy includes strengthening the public's understanding of the connection between health and housing and providing actionable consumer information that people can use to prevent disease and injury. The National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has taken steps to promote health literacy on multiple fronts, including: materials development; education and training for grantees; and policy initiatives. This presentation will focus on key strategies and lessons learned from NCEH health literacy activities that may be applicable to state and local health promotion efforts.

In 2009, health literacy was listed as one of the four overarching goals in the Surgeon General's Call to Action to Promote Healthy Homes. This and other initiatives provide valuable support for the Center's health literacy activities. Most recently, NCEH has been involved in a cross-agency collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a consumer-friendly Healthy Homes Web site following the principles described in Health Literacy Online: A Guide to Writing and Designing Easy-to-Use Health Web Sites (HHS, 2010). In addition to providing specific examples of health literacy activities, this presentation will emphasize the importance of having a broad range of stakeholders and strategies to improve health literacy.