Bridging the Gap: Equipping Families and Providers with Health Literacy Tools

“Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process and understand basic health information needed to make appropriate health decisions.” (SaferCareTexas.org) Individuals display varying degrees of health literacy. Socio-economic factors, generational trauma, culture, and language differences may create barriers to health literacy, thereby impacting families’ healthcare decisions and contributing to community-wide health disparities.

Our role as healthcare providers is to help bridge the gap and provide families with health literacy tools so they can make informed decisions about their child’s healthcare. This course will help healthcare professionals and healthcare consumers identify health literacy barriers and implement evidence-based health literacy strategies to better equip communication practices and effectively inform and empower patients and families to make appropriate healthcare decisions.

Following this training, participants will be able to:

1. Define health literacy and describe its impact on healthcare choices.
2. Identify at least 3 barriers to health literacy.
3. Describe at least 3 implementation tools to improve health literate communication.

This course meets the 2 PDH requirement previously referred to as DEI, as well as the Professional Development hours requirement! You can submit to ASHA through the ASHA Compliance Form.