Target audience: Patient Education Leads and Health Care Providers
Purpose of the CPEN Health Literacy Toolkit
Health literacy is a major challenge and many patient education leads and health care providers struggle with time and resources to address it. Interventions that have been shown to improve health literacy include: health provider training, patient training (self-management), and alternate document design. In response to a call for health literacy support on the CPEN listserv, a taskforce from seven health care centers (Princess Margaret Hospital, St. Michael's Hospital, Duke Cancer Institute, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Maine Health Cancer Resource Center, Fox Chase Cancer Center, Cancer 101 and Mayo Clinic) have pooled their resources into a toolkit for your use to promote health literacy at your organization (and to use for health literacy month in October).
Since research has shown health provider training, patient training and alternate document design to be effective at mitigating the effects of low health literacy, the toolkit is divided into the below headings.