Person-centred care: guidance for non-executive directors

Health Literacy

Which of the five 'Must Do with Me' principles does this relate to?

A primary aim of person-centred care is to enable people to have sufficient knowledge, understanding, confidence and skills to cope with the complex demands of modern health care. Meeting people's health literacy needs and communicating in meaningful ways is key to delivering person-centred care. It also improves the safety and effectiveness of care, and helps address health inequalities.

Health literacy is recognised globally as a priority health issue, and Scotland is at the vanguard in its promotion. The Scottish Government published Making it Easy - A Health Literacy Action Plan for Scotland in May 2014 and have also established a national Clinical Lead for Health Literacy.

Making it Easy - A Health Literacy Action Plan for Scotland sets out the actions the Scottish Government and partners are taking to help all of us in health and social care collaborate and help realise the ambition to live well, on our own terms, and with any condition we may have, by making sure that health and social care services cater for each of us - regardless of our abilities. Health literacy is at the heart of our commitment to delivering a safe, effective and person-centred healthcare system.

From Making it Easy - http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0045/00451263.pdf

The Health Literacy Place

NHS Education for Scotland Knowledge Services has developed the Health Literacy Place website to deliver on a key objective within the national Health Literacy Action Plan.

The Health Literacy Place is designed to be the 'go to' place for health literacy tools and support in Scotland.

Demonstrator Programme

A call to action invited health boards across Scotland to submit proposals for projects and NHS Tayside was awarded the programme in January 2015.

The overall aims of the programme are to:

• Design new, or build upon current, discharge pathways that improve communication between patients/carers tailored to their needs and circumstances.
• Provide meaningful, personalised information and check understanding about their tests, diagnosis, medication and further management.
• Enable staff to recognise and cater for the health literacy needs of those in their patient population.
• Design or build upon existing pathways of referral to out patient clinics create greater patient/carer engagement and effectiveness of clinic encounters using innovations.