IHA Conference 2013 - Let's share what we learned!

Hi Everyone,

Last week I attended the IHA (Institute for Healthcare Advancement) Health Literacy conference. It was the 12th annual HL conference, making it the longest running conference dedicated solely to HL. I hope that some of us who were there can help share what we learned with this LINCS Community.

I'll go first, and mention some highlights:

It is always great to hear some of the true leaders in health literacy speak about anything! But of course it is always enlightening and inspiring, whatever the topic. Here, these speakers included Ceci Doak, Andrew Pleasant, Dr. Richard Carmona, Rima Rudd, and Cliff Coleman, among others.

  • Brian Zikmund-Fisher gave an outstanding session called Why Are You Giving Me This Number? Accurate but Meaningless Health Data. This gave very concrete and surprising examples of how to make numerical information understanbable and meaningful.
  • Jennifer Cabe and Richard Carmona from Canyon Ranch Institute talked about The New Healthcare Landscape and the Role of Health Literacy, which highlighted some ways for us to help work toward the goals of the Affordable Care Act.
  • Doris Ravoutas and Deborah Boulware O'Nealdescribed a project on Tools to Assess and TEach Child Health Skills to Low Basic Literacy Patients. They talked about using the What to Do For Health book series, which could also be used in adult education classes.
  • Sabrina Kurts-Rossi talked about Paulo Freire's theories as they relate to health literacy in her talk, How Do You Know They Know? Methods for Evaluating Health Literacy Teaching and Training. This, too, can relate to teaching in an ABE setting.
  • The posters were excelllent!

There was so much more good stuff at this conference. The presentations (ppt.) and posters will soon be up on the IHA Website: iha4health.org.

Who else can tell us about your highlights? Let's hear from a bunch of you!

Julie