Panel A: Health Literacy-Related Safety Events as a Tactic to Improve Organizational Health Literacy and Health Outcomes

Speakers:
Mary Ann Abrams
Cori Gibson
Mindy Bibart
Andrea Morrison

Session Description:

By defining organizational health literacy—the “degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others”—Healthy People 2030 set the stage for identifying and implementing impactful interventions demonstrating how health literacy is integral to equity, safety, and quality. This provides an opportunity to extend evidence-based safety and quality methods to define, describe, and quantify health literacy-related communication safety events and to identify and implement health literacy-informed prevention and mitigation strategies. It also offers a tangible health system intervention for health equity since groups at risk for health disparities, including racial/ethnic minorities, those who do not identify English as their primary language, and people in poverty, are at higher risk for limited health literacy and associated poorer health outcomes.

This session will summarize the relationship between health literacy and safety, quality, and equity, then discuss two large pediatric health systems’ approaches to health literacy-related safety events.

Panelists will:

1. Describe the importance of organizational health literacy to safety, quality, and equity

2. Illustrate approaches to identifying, quantifying, describing, and using health literacy-related safety events in health care settings

3. Demonstrate potential applications of how health literacy-related safety event data and findings may inform approaches to preventing serious safety events.