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livingwell

Living Well DC
Living Well DC

What Is Health Literacy?

About - Residents

 

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.

The following are the guiding principles of how DC Health and their community partners approach health literacy work:

  • Everyone has the right to health information that helps them make informed decisions.
    • We strive to address needs of individuals as they relate to health insurance benefits literacy, healthcare systems literacy, and health behaviors literacy.
  • Health services should be delivered in ways that are understandable, culturally informed, relevant, and beneficial to health, longevity, and quality of life.
  • Cross-sector partnership, collaboration, and resource sharing is a priority.
  • Accountability is a priority. DC Health will track district wide health literacy trends, provide a platform for self-reporting of partner contributions to move forward the agenda, and provide high quality resources for partners. Partners will agree to prioritize tracking their own metrics as they relate to health literacy.