Yes, I did promise this. Here goes –
I need help! I am looking for people to help on a blog project.
Since we do not have a National Health Literacy Day, maybe we should
support Helen Osborne and her health literacy month of October. I am
not concerned if we call it health literacy month or healthcare
literacy month. Both seem applicable and appropriate. Maybe there
could be a World Health Literacy Day within the month of October.
In addition, since this is December
2012 and we have until October 2013 (actually September 2013) to get
topics ready and pick a few topics for the month for blogs. For
people in the Diabetes Online Community (DOC), we will want to
emphasize diabetes literacy. Now for the more complicated part, if
you like this, I could use help contacting other people with chronic
diseases to bring them into this, and expand this to all bloggers
throughout the world. This is how important I feel this could be.
In addition, people could blog in their own language. This would
make this usable to more people as not everyone reads English.
Each disease could have their part to
contribute to health literacy month. No, I am not suggesting a blog
every day, but maybe one blog per week on some facet of health
literacy. This would mean approximately four blogs from each blogger
for the month. Picking the different topics within health literacy
is also an area I will accept help as I am not the most organized
when it comes to this.
I had hoped to have correspondence from
Helen Osborne by now, but I have heard that she will not be available
until late December. I am hoping for some answers and guidance at
this time. I will still put some of my ideas out to see if there is
support for any of this.
A few of the topics that I have thought
about include:
1. Working with knowledgeable doctors in each disease to have
community meetings to discuss terms common to a disease and give the
meaning in terms everyone can understand. Even if this were only in
the month of October would be a good start.
2. Find community organizations that exist and have them put on a
meeting and invite a doctor specializing in that disease. Example:
There is an organization that meets monthly in my community on
Parkinson's disease.
3. Contact town or city officials and find out if there are any
groups they are aware of that are meeting some of the needs of people
with literacy problems. Literacy problems will also be health
literacy problems.
4. Contact the local YM or YWCA (if your community has one) and see
if they work with literacy problems.
5. Consider establishing a health literacy group and recruiting
people to assist people that are willing to accept assistance when
meeting with doctors, so that you may explain things to them that
they may not understand.
6. Study literacy and health literacy discussions on the Internet.
Example: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) site
has some useful information available and is one of 12 agencies under
the Health and Human Services (HHS) department that works for
improving healthcare. They do publish an excellent brochure about
safe medicine use. I picked up my copy at my local pharmacy. There
are other websites and some excellent blogs about health literacy.
I am open to most any suggestion either
in the comments area or by email – see my profile page. Another
source of information is this website.
Helen Osborne has several other
websites and this is one of them. The Institute of Medicine has an
excellent article on health literacy and I have written about some of
the topics that health literacy can have an effect on patients, here
and here.
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