To mark Health Information Week, NHS Knowledge for Healthcare have released the updated 2^nd edition of the Health Literacy Toolkit. The toolkit provides an excellent overview of free tools and techniques to support your spoken and written health communication. It also opens with an overview of the health and digital literacy reality in the UK, challenging our misconceptions and offering a way forward if our information is to be understood. We all accept that health literacy is important as people need to be able to understand health information to make decisions and use our health services effectively for better outcomes. By not addressing it in all we do, we risk widening already existing health inequalities when we have this guidance to help tackle them. The toolkit is here as a practical guide, supporting us to not take health literacy for granted; but instead make improvements to communicate more effectively.

At UHCW Library, our team support the production and access to patient information leaflets. We use the range of resources in this toolkit to guide our work, so it’s safe to say that we recommend it. From plain English guidance, designing for accessibility and readability, or signposting us to the NHS Style guide, there’s a highly effective set of resources ready to support NHS colleagues to communicate more effectively and accessibly for people accessing our services. Please find a few minutes and browse through the toolkit. Communication, whether spoken or written, is essential to healthcare and the updated health literacy toolkit is here to support you in plain terms in the interactive guide that is now available here: https://library.nhs.uk/health-information/ 

If you are interested in finding out more how UHCW Library supports the development of quality patient information, visit the Health Information pages of the library website.

If you are interested in finding out more about Health Information Week, follow us over on Twitter where we've been joining in the conversation: @UHCWLibrary and @UHCW_CEBIS. You can also follow the #HIW2023 hashtag