Today is one year and one month after the public release of the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy. The Health Literacy Workgroup at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sponsored the Action Plan, and we have spent the last year promoting it as a strategic planning tool. The plan has broad goals and strategies that cover every sector and organization in our society that provides health information and services.

Yet, even though this is a national plan, it can be used by one organization or a small group of organizations to identify their own action steps to improve health literacy. The National Action Plan is the tool to help you think strategically about your contribution to health literacy improvement. You can use CDC’s planning tool to help you with the process.

We will bring down the barriers to health literacy when we take action at all levels of our society – in the most overtaxed primary care clinics and in the big city health departments and government agencies that create and distribute health information on a mass scale. 

If you want ideas about what organizations large and small already are doing to improve health literacy, check out the postings on the LINCS Health Literacy listserv for the week of April 25, 2011. Happy Anniversary!