Learn how to help patients at our health literacy skills sessions

Our Health Literacy awareness sessions help you to communicate with your patients in a way in which they can understand.

Knowing about health literacy, and how low health literacy affects patients, you and your service can improve communication with patients and lead to many benefits such as:

fewer re-admissions
better compliance with taking medicines or following post-discharge advice
fewer missed appointments
increased patient satisfaction with your service
huge cost savings to the NHS (estimated at 3 to 5% of the NHS budget).

Did you know that in our area, nearly 55% of the patients you see may have problems with health literacy or health numeracy? This means they may not be able to understand the things you tell them or the information you give them. People with low health literacy suffer poor health outcomes as a result.

Our health literacy awareness sessions give you the knowledge, tools, and techniques to help overcome the barriers created by low health literacy and to help provide an equitable service.

Attend one of our sessions and find out:

what health literacy means
how prevalent low-health literacy is
how low health literacy can make your patients anxious and unable or unwilling to engage with healthcare services
practical tools that you can use to overcome the problems caused by low health literacy as you engage with patients
how to produce patient information leaflets that are easy for your patients to understand
how the Patient Education team can help and guide you through the process of creating leaflets and other patient education materials and getting them approved.

This is what people have said about our health literacy sessions:

I will spread the word amongst my colleagues about the help and expertise your team can offer our department. It has been a really enlightening experience learning from your team. Thank you so much.

… a really useful session and I have had lots of positive feedback.

It has certainly made us think about the language and the design used in our patient literature and written correspondence!

The information about patient literacy was interesting and the tips for language and layout invaluable for future reference.

Contact us to arrange a session tailored to your service. We’ll arrange a session to suit you, from 15 to 50 minutes, or however long you’ve got, delivered in person or over Teams.

Your Patient Education Knowledge Specialists:

Richard Brook – based at St. Richard’s Hospital, Chichester

Cecilia Bethencourt-Dunning – based at Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton

Isabella Santoro – based at Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton