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Other side of the coin: Defining "health literate healthcare organizations”
Monday, October 29, 2012
: 1:00 PM - 1:15 PM
Dean Schillinger, MD
,
Center for Vulnerable Populations and Division of General Internal Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Health literacy research has focused on characterizing patients' deficits, how best to measure a patient's health literacy, and clarifying relationships between limited health literacy and health outcomes. There is a growing appreciation, however, that health literacy is a dynamic state that represents the imbalance between (a) an individual's capacities to comprehend and apply health-related knowledge to health-related decisions and to acquire health-related skills and (b) the health literacy–related demands and attributes of the health care system. We characterize organizations that have committed to improving and reengineering themselves as “health-literate health care organizations” so as to better accommodate the communication needs of populations with limited health literacy, which reinforces the notion that the health care sector shares significant responsibility in promoting health literacy. At the request of the IOM Health Literacy Policy Roundtable, we identified 10 strategies that health care organizations can develop and implement to enable patients to access and benefit as much as possible from the range of health care services and health care entities involved in contemporary health care. This presentation attempts to advance a vision of how organizations should evolve to be more responsive to the needs of populations with limited health literacy in tangible ways, thereby improving care for all. The list of attributes and goals for health-literate health care organizations included in this paper represents our attempt to synthesize a body of knowledge and practice supported to the greatest extent possible by the state of the science in the young field of health literacy.
Learning Areas:
Communication and informatics
Diversity and culture
Other professions or practice related to public health
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Provision of health care to the public
Public health administration or related administration
Learning Objectives: Recognize that health literacy is a dynamic state that represents the imbalance between (a) an individual’s capacities to comprehend and apply health-related knowledge to health-related decisions and to acquire health-related skills and (b) the health literacy–related demands and attributes of the health care system.
Presenting author's disclosure statement:Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations at San Francisco General Hospital and Chief of the California Diabetes Prevention and Control Program doing practice-based, translational research. I am also an international research expert on health communication and chronic diseases.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines,
and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed
in my presentation.
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