What is health literacy?
DC Health is dedicated to proactively leading and engaging District partners in achieving health equity through collaborative practice change, including reducing health disparities by advancing health literacy. Through this work, we can help to increase DC residents' ability to discover, comprehend, and use information and services to make informed health decisions. In this work, we applied the updated equity-informed national framework focusing on both personal, organizational and professional health literacy, as defined below.
- Personal health literacy is an individual’s ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decision and actions for themselves and others.
- Organizational health literacy is how well individuals are equitably empowered by organizations to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decision and actions for themselves and others.
- Professional health literacy is how effectively health and other organizational professionals can communicate with and support individuals and communities to access, understand, and evaluate health related information, as well as obtain needed services.
Building Health Knowledge