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Shaping a Health Literate Organization

By Greg O’Neill, MSN, APRN, AGCNS-BC, NPD-BC, NEA-BC 

 

Stakeholder: What is it that you do here?  

Me: I boil the ocean, one cup at a time.  

 

medical team holding jigsaw pieces

As a champion of health literacy, you want to make your own organization more health literate. As we learn more about how to help patients, families, and communities understand their health and take action to improve their quality of life, a few things become clear: 

  • Becoming a health literate organization will generally be slower and more complex than we wish it was.  

  • It will require a culture change in the way all health professionals practice their craft.  

  • Care delivery systems and support must be improved to meet the need at scale.  

  • Organizations will need to appreciate and invest in health literacy interventions to reach their goals. 

 

You may have a background in patient care or patient experience, or in something less obvious like information technology. Or you may be part of a team working to improve patient education.  

 

All these perspectives are important, but none may fully prepare you to organize, plan, and represent the work needed to improve the health literacy of an entire organization. Indeed, you may sometimes feel like the Lone Ranger taking on the Wild West. Whether you are new to the health literacy movement or a longtime veteran, it can feel like there are so many things to focus on and so few resources to devote that it can be intimidating and confusing. Here are some strategies for successfully shaping a health literate organization. 

 

Assess the Current State 

Start by deciding what the current situation is in your organization. How has health education and communication been managed until now? Who owns any vendor contracts and why? What systems are used to manage content? What organizational goals can be supported through health literacy interventions? How is data collected? How are regulatory requirements fulfilled? What do patients say about the education process? 

 

Make a Plan 

Next, make a realistic, practical, and economical plan with short- and long-term goals. Many factors can influence the complexity and scope of how that plan will be crafted and carried out. Some health literacy champions lack influence, financial control, and leadership relationships within an organization that suffers from a fractured culture. Meanwhile, other health literacy champions may have more of a team, some input into vendor contracts, strong senior leadership support, and a more cohesive operational culture.   

 

Build Strong Ties 

Ultimately, if you want to impact care, change hearts and minds, and establish expertise and authority, you will need to develop strong relationships within your organization at all levels. Nothing will happen if you don’t connect and have a shared understanding with other process owners, senior and department leaders, patient advocates, and direct care staff. So, advocate for leadership support, and establish a network of health literacy allies within the system. 

 

Make a Business Case  

Make a business case for the realistic investment in health literacy that you see as necessary in the long run and take ownership of interventions. Through your leadership, care delivery can be more effective and efficient. Consolidated systems that are centrally managed can reduce waste. Translate your mission into one that benefits the organization and the people in your care. This can help with future strategic investment proposals and planning. 

 

Strike a Balance Between Building the Strategy and Doing the Work 

It can be tempting to take on a library of materials that need health literacy editing, or to train teaching staff in using eight different systems for delivering patient education content. While this may be necessary to gain or practice skills related to plain language editing, stakeholder management, and meeting provider needs related to specific initiatives, it may also create a situation where no plans are developed or carried out because the current care delivery model needs are a never-ending task of editing and managing content.  

 

Strategies for Success in 3 Key Areas 

Question: Which area should I take on first in my organization — improving practical skills, improving content, or advocating for change? 

Answer: Actually, you can have short- and long-term goals in all three areas — regardless of the size of your team or your place in the organization. You will simply need to match the size of your goals to the resources you have at your disposal. 

 

Here are some tips for doing the work of health literacy while you build the movement in each of these three key areas. 

1. Improve Practical Skills 

Quickly determine what practical health literacy skills everyone in the organization can learn to improve care. Is it promoting plain language, prioritizing information, including a home caregiver, and confirming understanding with teach-back? Great! That’s done. Now you can see where to embed those skills. These can serve as a foundation for all health literacy work to come.  

In addition, find out what teams are responsible for teaching and informing direct caregivers, whether it is nursing onboarding or provider orientation or quality and safety or local leaders or other entities and work with them to craft a variety of educational tools that can be directly integrated on a regular basis. This will help spread the word and build the competency needed to improve practice delivery. Learn what kinds of tools work best — from huddle tips to microlearning videos to web-based modules to live scenario-based workshops to health literacy month recognition and more.  

 

2. Improve Content 

Explore the content ecosystem in your organization, and work with the willing to improve some content immediately. This will help develop your editing, design, and tactical skills while building relationships with stakeholders, slowly transforming them into local advocates. Evaluate current patient education vendor content and distribution for health literacy best practices, and work towards consistency and planning in how they are used. 

 

3. Advocate for Change 

Invite yourself to meet every leader or to present in every venue you can. The more people see you leading the work and listening to the need, the better chance you have of building influence, closing process gaps, sharing in the mission, contributing to outcomes, and helping other parts of the system reach their goals. Advocacy and awareness will never stop because healthcare is always evolving, and changing a culture can take time. Stay hydrated, get some sleep, and keep reaching out. Eventually you will find people turning to you for support or, even better, advocating for health literacy in your absence!  

 

We’re in This Together 

Finally, never hesitate to reach out to other health literacy leaders for advice, support, and reflection. No one knows the best way to bring your organization along for the health literacy ride because all systems are different. There is a strong community of people just waiting to help guide you, save you from some pitfalls, humor you through long days, and inspire you to keep at it.  

 

We can all be the change we want to see in the world. At the end of the day (or the end of a blog), all we can do is get back to the mission. So, what is your plan?  


About the Author

Greg O'Neill headshot

Greg O’Neill is director of Patient & Family Health Education at ChristianaCare. He leads the strategic plan for patient education and health literacy initiatives. In this role, he has developed a team of nursing professional development specialists who champion health literacy best practices systemwide and support a range of patient education initiatives and vendor relationships. He also leads the Health Literacy Council of Delaware, where he’s working to build a shared model to address community needs throughout the state. 


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