Moving toward greater health literacy at Old Town Clinic

Old Town Clinic, an HCH grantee in downtown Portland, devotes twenty hours per week of a Health Educator’s time to improving the organization’s health literacy. This Health Educator has a professional background that includes ensuring research-related materials are accessible (in terms of plain language and formatting) to research participants and stakeholders, many of whom were people with various types of disabilities. Implementing learning for a health literacy conference, the Health Educator has addressed health literacy and numeracy throughout the organization, including attention to clinic signage, clinical assessments, health-related educational materials, and other important patient information. More recently, this effort has focused on working with the patient/client advisory board, focus groups, and individual patients to ensure materials are accessible and to get feedback for additional improvements including what types of health information materials are needed but are not yet offered. These conversations are also helping to identify training needs of staff.