Colleagues,
    I am a Community Health Intern at a county health department.  My focus area is improving health literacy in our county.  I am very interested in targeting medical providers in our communities, and alerting them to both the prevalence of health literacy issues and also to how they can make their offices more health literacy friendly.  One way in which we thought about going about this is to offer a new service that would check the readability levels of information they disseminate in their office to their patients.  We also were possibly thinking of developing a toolkit for health providers on how to ensure they are practicing clear health communication practices in both verbal and written communication.  My question is if anyone else has tackled health literacy from this standpoint of addressing the providers, and if so, what kind of programs worked/ did not work for you.  Also, I want to ensure we have an appropriate evaluation/assessment tool for the program so at
 the end we can quantitatively identify the changes that were made, like average reading level, patient satisfaction, etc.  Any suggestions for this evaluation would also be appreciated.  I appreciate your input as we all work together to improve health literacy.
   
  Matt Gayer
  Community Health Intern
  Jefferson County Health Department
  1818 Lonedell Drive
  Arnold, Missouri, 63010
  636-282-1010
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