Our Blog: where do you stand?

Health Literacy Tips for Public Health Campaigns

By: Beth Minnigerode | 10/17/2011

Even for those with a medical degree, the complex world of health care can make your head spin at times.  Now, imagine you are one of the 40 million adults in the United States reading at or below a fifth grade level. How are you supposed to understand the disease you've just been diagnosed with and how to take healthy steps to keep it from getting worse? Or, better yet, how are you supposed to prevent potential health problems in the first place?

As communicators who are sometimes charged with educating the public, it's our job to keep our audiences in mind when developing educational materials. We all understand good writing skills like avoiding jargon and using active voice, but the principles of health literacy go a bit further.

In honor of Health Literacy Month, I'm doing a three-part series to share some of the key principles I learned in my health literacy studies. Thank you to the three main resources I referenced during my studies: the textbook Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills, National Institutes of Health Plain Language online training  and Health Literacy Missouri.

I'll start by addressing the overall organization of your communications piece. But, stay tuned for tips on writing and appearance.

Health Literacy Tips - Organization

• Spend some time to define the exact objective of your piece. Ask "What outcome do I want for the patients? What are patients to do with the information - learn a new procedure, be motivated to seek help, reduce their worry?"
• Limit the number of objectives the piece will address and don't include information that doesn't directly impact your objectives. For example, if you want a patient to understand what hypertension is and have them follow a medication regimen for it; don't cover topics such as getting more exercise, cutting down on salt or getting regular physical exams.
• Before you start writing, ask: "What is the single most important thing I need the audience to understand?" Then, get to that point quickly. If you could only write one sentence to get your main point across, what would it be? Then, move on to proactively addressing common questions you think patients will have.
• Emphasize behaviors and skills that will lead to the desired patient outcomes rather than only facts. Facts may imply what a patient's behavior should be, but low literacy patients may not see the implication. Patients don't need to learn the underlying principles to understand and carry out the behaviors.

Posted in Health Care