Health literacy requires a combined focus on personal and organizational health literacy. Early childhood programs and other organizations play an important role in making sure people understand and have equal access to health-related information and services. By focusing on health-literate practices, programs can improve communication, reduce health disparities, and advance health equity for all.
Head Start and other early childhood programs that focus on health literacy can improve the well-being of children, families, and staff. Promoting health literacy also increases the likelihood that children are healthy and ready to learn. One of the best ways to do this is by helping people understand and respond to the variety of conditions and factors that affect their overall health. This resource can help early childhood programs become health literate organizations.
Defining Health Literacy
Healthy People 2030 defines health literacy as both personal and organizational:
Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals can 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 all individuals 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.
Guiding Principles
Based on recommendations from the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy, the guiding principles highlight seven core concepts: capacity, content, equity, dissemination, feedback, practice, and evaluation. Programs can use them to increase their capacity to implement health-literate practices and evaluate their progress.
Capacity: Understand health literacy and implement health-literate practices.
Developing expertise in personal and organizational health literacy, including clear communication and plain language principles, is an important step in increasing the capacity of early childhood programs to deliver health-literate information, programs, and services.
Organizational health literacy improves a program’s ability to carry out strategies that make it easier for staff and families to understand health information. It also helps a program engage with community partners in the health care system and get the greatest benefits from early childhood programs.
Content: Offer health information that is easy to find, understand, and use.
When early childhood programs include health literacy principles in all products and services, it is easier for staff and families to understand and use the messages and materials. Programs can use these principles to improve the information and resources they develop and share with families and staff.
With more knowledge of health literacy, early childhood programs increase the likelihood that families will understand and use the resources they receive. Here are a few strategies:
- Develop or adapt materials so they are relevant to the families in their program.
- Choose resources that are accurate, accessible, and actionable.
- Share information using the types of communication most often used by the families in their program.
Equity: Implement equitable, inclusive, and culturally and linguistically responsive practices.
Early childhood programs can improve their ability to support staff and families by increasing awareness of the impact of culture and language on communication. Health literacy practices that lead to culturally and linguistically appropriate services can improve cross-cultural communication. These practices also make it easier to access care, increase the quality of care, and reduce health disparities.
The National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) can support programs in fully understanding the importance of culture and language. The CLAS standards are “a set of 15 action steps providing a blueprint for individuals and health and health care organizations to implement culturally and linguistically appropriate services.”
Dissemination: Share accurate, accessible, and actionable information to guide health decisions.
Sharing evidence-based resources with families and staff is important to health literacy. Programs help families and staff by making sure the resources they share are accurate, accessible, and actionable. Early childhood programs can help families learn how to find trusted sources of health information.
Feedback: Ask for, review, and apply feedback.
Including the intended user in the process of developing, choosing, and sharing health information is an essential characteristic of health literate organizations. Programs can gather feedback to improve content by inviting families and others in the community to review resources. Intended users can provide feedback on health messages, handouts or other resources, educational events, and community-based programs or activities.
Early childhood programs can model best practice by creating a culture of listening and including the recommendations of the audiences served. The audience may be families with young children, staff in early childhood programs, community partners, program consultants, and others in the community engaged with children from birth to age 5. Increasing the capacity of programs to gather and use feedback is important to advancing health-literate practices and making sure health communication is effective.
Practice: Adopt and implement guidance, resources, and tools that promote health literacy.
To be a health literate organization, programs must include health literacy in the program’s mission and operations. Leaders can build health literacy into planning, evaluation, policies, procedures, service design, policy development, partnership building, and quality improvement.
Early childhood programs can use these guiding principles to review health literacy practices on an ongoing basis and during the annual self-assessment to make sure they are developing, promoting, and carrying out practices that support and improve health literacy.
Evaluation: Assess the impact of health literacy principles on early childhood program practices.
Programs can improve their effectiveness by setting up continuous quality improvement efforts that focus on health literacy. For example, they can use these guiding principles to assess their resources and health literacy methods. Organizations can also set up metrics to show how their health literacy practices make a difference for families. Reviewing organizational practices with a focus on health literacy improves communication and builds the capacity to become health literate organizations.
The seven guiding principles described above raise the responsibility of early childhood programs to put health literacy into practice. By adopting and applying these principles, early childhood programs can develop processes to improve their staff and families’ ability to make informed health-related decisions and actions.
Last Updated: August 4, 2023