Health and Literacy Compendium: Introduction

Health and Literacy Compendium Home Page

Introduction

This Compendium was written with two main goals in mind: to help literacy teachers and students find and use health information and to share literacy information and easy-to-read health materials with health professionals, community educators, and patients. The Health and Literacy Compendium includes over 80 citations to print and Web materials available in North America that cover:

The links between health status and literacy status
How to assess and develop easy-to-read health education materials
How to teach health with literacy in mind, and how to teach literacy using health content
Background information about the literacy field and "participatory" education methodologies
Curricula and materials on a variety of health topics for adults with limited literacy skills
Bibliographies and databases of easy-to-read or multilingual health information and brochures
Bibliographies and databases of materials, including journal articles, about the connections between health and literacy

Each citation includes a description of the material cited and how to order it. At the back of the Compendium is a list of key organizational resources; publishers and distributors in the health and literacy fields, many of whom produce easy-to-read and multilingual brochures and pamphlets; and indices of the print and Web materials by subject, language, reading level, and document format.

The Web version of this Compendium, which will be regularly updated, is available at http://www.worlded.org/us/health/docs/comp/. The Web version is searchable and includes direct links to the resources cited.

While the materials mentioned in the Compendium are all deemed to have value for health and literacy education, their inclusion in this work-in-progress does not constitute an endorsement of the work, nor a guarantee of the materials' accuracy.