Health literacy is a needed strategy in early childhood programs. It improves the quality of communication, reduces health disparities, and advances health equity.
Use this toolkit to support the use of health literacy practices in early childhood programs. It lays a foundation for early childhood programs to further develop as health literate organizations. It is a resource for increasing knowledge and skills. This toolkit also gives best practices for organizational health literacy.
The Health Literacy Guiding Principles for Early Childhood Programs frames a vision for becoming a health literate early childhood organization. These principles highlight seven core concepts: capacity, content, equity, dissemination, feedback, practice, and evaluation.
Defining Health Literacy
Healthy People 2030 defines health literacy as both personal and organizational.
Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others. Promoting personal health literacy helps to make sure that people can understand and act on health information so they can be healthy. Also, personal health literacy can help people focus on the health of their community.
Organizational health literacy is the degree to which organizations make it possible for people to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others. An organization improves personal health literacy by making its health information and services easier for people to understand and use.
Adopting and applying these principles is helpful for early childhood programs. They can develop processes that can improve the ability of staff and families to make informed decisions about their health.
This toolkit explores all seven principles. It includes opportunities for program administrators, directors, and staff to learn more. Each section has a skill development component, a learning activity, and a list of resources to learn more and to support families.
Last Updated: March 4, 2024