B1.01 - Oral: An Opportunity to Enhance Health Literacy Competencies in Public Health Professionals

Brief Abstract Summary: Health Literacy (HL) is important in health care access and quality to advance health equity. Limited HL affects 9 out of 10 adults in the United States and results in the inability to follow medicine instructions, decreased preventative care, and overall health status. Studies tell us that most providers do not routinely receive HL education as a part of their training. As professionals who serve as a resource to others, health educators from all practice settings will benefit from a framework to provide health literacy training in the workforce.
We will describe our work providing HL training to public health providers. Attendees will receive an overview of our partnership development; and will learn about the trainings provided to enhance written and oral communication. Finally, attendees will hear evaluation results that show increases in perceived skill, knowledge, and confidence to implement these in practice.

Detailed abstract description: Health Literacy is an important factor to improve health care access and quality and to advance health equity. Limited health literacy affects 9 out of 10 English-speaking adults in the United States. Low health literacy can result in the inability to follow medicine instructions, decreased use of preventative care, and overall decreased health status.
Health care consumers indicate they want health professionals to communicate in a way they can understand. Health literacy best practices support this. However, studies tell us that health care professionals do not routinely receive health literacy education as a part of their professional training. This presentation will detail information about a workforce training process to provide public health professionals health literacy best practices training.
Working with public health partners, a health literacy team delivered and evaluated a series of workforce training offerings to enhance both written and oral communication based on health literacy best practices. Course content focused on creating written content that uses plain language best practices to enhance readability, understandability, and actionability and introduced a specific communication technique to confirm understanding, called teach-back. Most sessions were offered virtually with a few in-person options. Session activities were designed to be interactive to enhance participation and learning outcomes.
This presentation aims to describe the process and outcomes of training the public health workforce on clear communication best practices. This will include successful delivery methods and other lessons learned, as well as post-training evaluation results that indicate 90% or greater increased perceived skills and knowledge, and confidence in practice implementation.