Health Literacy Guidebook | UnityPoint Health

Health Literacy Guidebook | UnityPoint Health

New Guidebook on Becoming a Health Literate Organization

“Building Health Literate Organizations: A Guidebook to Achieving Organizational Change” takes the attributes described in Institute of Medicine discussion paper, “Ten Attributes of Health Literate Health Care Organizations” to the next level. The guidebook, by Dr. Mary Ann Abrams and colleagues:

• helps health care organizations of any size engage in organizational change to become health literate.
• complements many health literacy resources, including AHRQ’s Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit, helping organizations use them effectively and reliably.

Read Impact Studies about how health care organizations have used AHRQ's Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit at: http://www.ahrq.gov/literacy.

• Download Guidebook

Key Points

• Health literacy is basic to quality, safety, and equity in health care.
• To improve health literacy, we need to change how people and organizations behave. And we need to embed and spread those changes in the system.
• This book is laid out according to areas UnityPoint Health found useful in its health literacy work as they relate to the attributes of a health literate health care organization.
• Use this as a guide, rather than a step-by-step manual. Begin where it makes sense to you and your organization, and move from there.