Health Literacy - Making Health Accessible
Health literacy is how people understand and engage with health care information.
With the average adult reading age in the UK being 9 years old and NHS information written at a reading age of 14-16 years old there is a big gap.
This leads to people not being able to understand and apply health care information to their lives and results in more hospital admissions, increased pressure on the NHS, poorer health in the public and affects deprived communities the most. This leads to inequality in our communities.
My name is Dominique Byrne, I am an Advanced Critical Care Practitioner in Portsmouth. I came across the issue of health literacy while doing post graduate studies in critical care. I realised that this was a topic most of my colleagues weren't aware of. This led me to publish a paper on this topic in the Nursing Standard in 2022 and start running teaching sessions, working with the clinical librarians and speaking at conferences to get the information out into the workforce. I am currently pursuing a masters in this topic and planning a PhD as well as being involved in many health literacy projects around the country.
Poor health literacy is an expensive problem and increases the workload on an already stretched service. My goal is for the NHS to become a health literate health service. This will improve public health and help to ease the pressure that all health care staff are facing.
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Health Literacy Toolkit
The four techniques:
Content creation:
Use the readability checker to check all written information:
https://readability.ncldata.dev/
Use the CEFR to assess the words you are using:
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