Though It May Be Too Early to Start Shopping for a Halloween Costume...

It's never too early for LCCT to start gearing up for October's National Health Literacy Month! You might be thinking, "do they realize that October is almost five months away?" The answer is yes, but don't worry. We do have a reason! We've got big plans for Health Literacy Month and want to get everyone involved, so we're loading up the bandwagon starting now! That means there's no better time than the present for you to tell us about what you’ve been doing, or what you’d like to do to improve communication between Central Texas patients and their healthcare providers.

Your efforts are making a difference in our community, so don’t let them go unrecognized. No effort is too small! Tell us what you're up to and let us promote your commitment to improved health communication during National Health Literacy Month!

Here’s what we need to know: What are you doing to combat low health literacy? What projects or discussions has your organization started to address the problem in our community? Do you want to join the health literacy movement, but don’t know how to get started?

Comment and tell us about it! Let's put our heads together to make this Health Literacy the biggest Central Texas has ever seen!

Quick Health Literacy Resources To Get You Up To Speed

Do you ever read our blog posts or get e-mails from us about health literacy and think, “This sounds really important, but I’m not sure I’m ready to add another issue to my catalog of causes”? We know, you need quick proof that health literacy is worth your time, and quick ways to keep up. Here are a few resources that will get you up to speed on the facts behind health literacy, and keep you in the loop once you're hooked. Who says advocacy can’t be efficient?

1. Partnership for Clear Health Communication’s Health Literacy: Statistics at A Glance is a great place to get the basics.

2. Low Health Literacy: Implications for National Health Policy-- for an added body slam of relevance.

3. The Health Literacy Discussion List is a low-maintenance way to keep posted on new issues and efforts in place to fight low health literacy. Plus, you can post your own questions or announcements to get some national input.

6 ways health literacy can make you a stronger instructor

Adult educators often wonder what they’re getting themselves into when they sign up for one of our Health Literacy Instructor Trainings. I mean, how can one person manage to address all of life’s issues in just a few short classes a week? Well, let’s face it, that’s just impossible. But teachers know that learning is a lifelong journey and are always looking for new strategies to make their classrooms better. So, here are six ways our Health Literacy Instructor Training can make stronger instructors:

1. By offering a new perspective on their students’ issues outside of the classroom

2. By giving tools to engage every student and make lessons even more relevant

3. By creating instructors that are confident in handling student inquiries about healthcare issues affecting their learning

4. By illustrating how substantially students’ literacy skills affect them economically in the healthcare setting

5. By making it easier to keep class attendance up

6. By teaching them how to empower not only their students, but themselves as patients.

What this training won’t do is make instructors health experts or substitutes for healthcare professionals and social workers. Our goal is to, in a short three and a half hours, make instructors even greater resources for their students and strengthen their curriculum. Every student sees the health of their families as their top priority. By motivating instructors to create a bridge between literacy and healthcare, our hope is that the individuals they serve can spend more time learning and less time worrying about healthcare.

If you’re ready to learn more, e-mail me at lobar@willread.org to sign-up for our next central training on April 6th! We hope to see you there!

Because everyone needs a little help when it comes to healthcare

So, I just finished my second month as Health Literacy Specialist VISTA at the Literacy Coalition! I already take pleasure in looking back and assessing all I've learned about literacy in the healthcare setting over just a couple of months. One of the biggest surprises so far has been finding out that even I underestimated the health resources available to me before my days at The Coalition. My wake-up call came in the form of my first beast of an undertaking with the LCCT: the 2011 Healthcare Resource Directory.

As mundane as updating hundreds of addresses and phone numbers may be, the reward at the end of it all is pretty substantial. For those of you who have never used our directory, it can be best described as a consolidation of information on all of the low-cost clinics, hospitals, specialty health services, and healthcare benefits programs available to Central Texans and their families. It’s designed to be used by professionals in healthcare, social services, adult education… whoever has access to populations at risk for low health literacy. Those professionals are in a prime spot to be valuable resources to patients through personal referrals. The new and improved 3rd edition of The Directory will contain all of the helpful information the 2nd did last year, with the addition of a new chapter dedicated to healthcare navigation and patient resources. This chapter will list services Central Texans need to fill out their health benefits applications, get to their appointments, coordinate their medications and treatments, get legal advice about their healthcare, and more. The latest edition will also include a handy index, expanded glossary, and a few other tricks to help users find the information they need, fast.

I once thought that the right motivation and total access to pretty much every imaginable piece of information every person has ever documented (A.K.A. the Internet) would be more than enough to equip me for making simple health decisions. Turns out... Not so much. Having access to everything doesn’t always mean finding what you need. With The Directory, we try to fill that gap between information access and actual comprehension. We do all the sifting and sorting so that you can skip a few headaches and help more people. Cool, huh?

The 2011 Healthcare Resource Directory is set to roll out in early February, so e-mail me at lobar@willread.org A.S.A.P. to reserve your organization’s copy!