Health literacy is an individual’s ability to find, understand, and act on health information and services. Lower levels of health literacy can lead to patients not understanding crucial information about their health, which contributes to health inequalities.

Healthcare providers, councils, voluntary sector groups, and others play a vital role in equitably enabling people to access, understand, and act on health information. The degree to which organisations achieve this is known as their ‘organisational health literacy.’

Our aim:
To increase the number of people and organisations in Dorset’s health and care system  that equitably enable people to find, understand and act on health related information. Our objectives we to:

  1. Increase awareness of health literacy.
  2. Increase people’s ability to act to address low health literacy.
  3. Identify options for increasing the scale and impact of work to address low health literacy in Dorset.

Over the past 18 months, we have been collaborating with partners across various organisations in Dorset to support them in becoming more health literate. With funding from NHS Dorset, we commissioned support from Dr Mike Oliver at Health Literacy Matters UK. With Mike’s help, we have:

  • Delivered health literacy awareness training.
  • Trained over 50 health literacy champions with additional skills to enhance their organisations health literacy.
  • Facilitated a health literacy community of practice for champions to support and learn from each other.

Health literacy champions are now delivering training and offering broader support to others in their organisations on health literacy. In total, over 400 people in Dorset have been directly trained in health literacy awareness.

On Monday 3 March, we co-hosted an event with Patricia Miller, Chief Executive for NHS Dorset, attended by over 60 people at The Spire in Poole to celebrate the work of Dorset’s Health Literacy Champions and explore how they can continue working to build health literate organisations in Dorset. Below are the organisations who have taken part in our health literacy programme training.

dch

Dorset County Hospital

dhc 2

Dorset HealthCare

nhs dorset 5

NHS Dorset

BU

Bournemouth University

dorset council

Dorset Council

waterlily project

The Waterlily Project

community action

Community Action Network

PHD 3

Public Health Dorset

WCA

Wessex Cancer Alliance

bcp 5

BCP Council

AD

Active Dorset

healthwatch dorset

Healthwatch Dorset

LWD

LiveWell Dorset

PCN

Primary Care Networks

help and care 3

Help & Care

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Health literacy testimonials

Read how some organisations are integrating health literacy initiatives following the training programme.

I am working on a project to use Forum Theatre to teach and practice teach-back and chunk & check.

Always test your materials with patients to gather feedback and make necessary improvements.

I had a patient who was using a TENS machine for pain…she said she could only use it when she was going to lie down. I questioned this and it turned out the pads were so old they didn’t stick anymore which was why she had to lie down. I went through the whole process with her again and asked her to buy new pads and how she would use them and she then got a lot better outcome to her pain experience.

Its not just about the written word-there are 2 sides to the coin-presenting information well and in an appropriate style and enabling (empowering) individuals to upskill their literacy skill set (without patronisation!)