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In acknowledgement that the U.S. healthcare system can be excessively complex, health literate organizations take responsibility to ensure that everyone, especially the vulnerable, is able to find, understand, and use health information and services. ´óÏóÊÓƵhas developed education and training programs that teach health literacy skills, all available for free.

AHRQ's Making Informed Consent an Informed Choice: Training Modules for Health Care Leaders and Professionals

The two interactive training modules—AHRQ's Making Informed Consent an Informed Choice: Training Modules for Health Care Leaders and Professionals—teach strategies that healthcare organizations and clinical teams can use to ensure that people understand their alternatives and help them make an informed choice.

The SHARE Approach

The SHARE Approach, a train-the-trainer curriculum, supports the training of healthcare professionals on how to engage patients in their health care decisionmaking. Health literacy tools include: Health Literacy and Shared Decisionmaking: A Reference Guide for Health Care Providers and Communicating Numbers to Your Patients: A Reference Guide for Health Care Providers.

The Health Literate Care Curriculum

Representatives from AHRQ, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine (ZSOM) at Hofstra/Northwell, and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Health Literacy collaborated to create a Health Literacy Care Curriculum for medical students. The comprehensive Health Literate Care Curriculum, guided by the Health Literate Care Model and anchored by the ´óÏóÊÓƵHealth Literacy Universal Toolkit, was implemented by ZSOM in the fall of 2019. Read about the curriculum’s development in .

Serving Patients With Limited English Proficiency

The publication Improving Patient Safety Systems for Patients With Limited English Proficiency: A Guide for Hospitals focuses on how hospitals can better identify, report, monitor, and prevent medical errors in patients with limited English proficiency. The following videos show interpreters using TeamSTEPPS communication strategies.

• Limited English Proficiency Safety: Checkback
  Clarifying the meaning of a patient's reported symptoms can make the difference between timely treatment and a delayed or incorrect diagnosis. This TeamSTEPPS technique, part of a proven teamwork system, is reinforced when a Spanish-speaking translator intervenes to clarify the meaning of a patient's reported symptom.
• Limited English Proficiency Safety: CUS Words
  Using plain language to describe specific procedures can help patients understand whether they may have a negative reaction. The Spanish-speaking translator in this video uses TeamSTEPPS techniques to make sure the doctor uses plain language when speaking to the patient.

Advancing Pharmacy Health Literacy Practices Through Quality Improvement

These Advancing Pharmacy Health Literacy Practices Through Quality Improvement modules help pharmacy faculty integrate health literacy and health literacy quality improvement into courses, experiential education, and projects for PharmD students and pharmacy residents. Also available is an in-service curriculum: Strategies To Improve Communication Between Pharmacy Staff and Patients: Training Program for Pharmacy Staff.