The Council of Europe’s Guide to Health Literacy – Contributing to trust building and equitable access to healthcare has been enriched with seven new good practices implemented in Germany, Luxembourg, Italy and Serbia.
These new practices provide concrete examples of how health literacy can be strengthened in a variety of contexts and among different populations. They illustrate approaches aimed at improving communication, facilitating access to understandable health information, promoting the participation of patients and communities, and developing tools tailored to people’s needs.
Seven new practices to discover
The seven initiatives recently added to the Guide cover a wide range of topics:
- Germany – a participatory approach to improving communication among health professionals and developing approaches tailored to their health literacy needs (PIKoG).
- Germany – an initiative aimed at Reducing myths and misconceptions when Advising on Advance Directives (MyPatH).
- Italy - an initiative aimed at integrating Roma and Sinti communities into the healthcare system.
- Luxembourg – redesigning invitations to national breast and colorectal cancer screening programmes to make information clearer, more accessible and easier to understand.
- Luxembourg - an approach aimed at strengthening patient participation by involving patients in competence networks.
- Luxembourg – an awareness-raising initiative in community pharmacies to strengthen information, prevention and early detection of type 2 diabetes.
- Serbia – OncoGuide – Breast Cancer Serbia: a digital platform designed to strengthen the health literacy of women living with breast cancer.
These new practices complement the existing resources and provide concrete experiences for policymakers, health professionals and other health stakeholders seeking to strengthen health literacy at individual, organisational and policy levels.
