SPH is excited to welcome an internationally known health-literacy expert as the first visiting senior scholar to the Herschel S. Horowitz Health Literacy Center.Harvard senior lecturer and 2009 recipient of the Pfizer Health Literacy in Advancing Safety Award, Dr. Rima Rudd will spend Tuesday and Wednesday, Dec. 1-2 instructing faculty, staff and campus health directors in evaluating health literacy. The event will kick off a six-month-long program, during which Dr. Rudd will visit the Literacy Center every two to three months.
“Our goal is to build the capacity of our students and faculty to advance health-literacy science, and this is one way to do it—to bring in someone so renown,” said director of the Health Literacy Center, Dr. Bonnie Braun.
Dr. Rudd is inspired by the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire, who had a deep respect for poor and oppressed people. Freire believed their common sense was just as valuable as the scientific education of a scholar.
Rudd’s work is marked by the same belief, working to create health literacy across socioeconomic classes. According to the Harvard Public Health NOW Web site, she has spoken at health professional society meetings across the country and authored the action plan for health literacy for the Department of Health and Human Services’ “Healthy People 2010.” She also served on the Institute of Medicine committee that produced a 2004 report, “Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion.”
Next week, doctorate students, SPH faculty, and the directors of the campus Health Center and the Center for Healthy Families will attend an invitational-only workshop led by Rudd, during which she’ll detail a checklist from her own published guidebook for evaluating health literacy. The audience will then be asked to use the checklist to measure the degree of literacy of a health provider.
In general, health literacy friendliness is measured by how smooth the process is to obtain whatever health services or information a person is trying to get. “If it’s got a lot of barriers, it’s not health literacy friendly,” Dr. Braun explained, and she provided a simplified scenario of a health-literacy issue:
Say you are told to go to a certain department in a hospital, like radiology. Then, perhaps you set out without direction to find the department. Your challenge is to understand what radiology is, how it’s spelled and to recognize the word if there are signs. A health literacy friendly environment would provide directions, perhaps use a simple word like ” x-ray” or a picture of the place you are to go. If there was enough staff, perhaps someone would take you.
Although the workshop is invitational only, later visits by Dr. Rudd will be open.
Dr. Rudd will also meet with students and faculty by appointment next week to discuss research projects, and she can continue to mentor them throughout the six-month program.
Dr. Braun couldn’t be more pleased by the arrangement. “The fact that she’s willing to consult with the students and faculty over time shows that she is quite a teacher. It couldn’t be a better start to our Center.”
Check out Dr. Rudd’s Health Literacy Web site, which serves as a guide for health educators in the field. Read more about Dr. Rudd here. To learn more about the Health Literacy Center here.
No comments:
Post a Comment