Founded and led by Dr. Fleary, Pumpkin Vine LLC is a solutions-based, health literacy company offering training, consultation, and evaluation services to organizations interested in improving the health literacy of their organizations and/or consumers.
ORGANIZATIONAL HEALTH LITERACY
Healthy People 2030 defines organizational health literacy as 'the degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.' Informed by this definition, the National Academy of Medicine's 10 Attributes of a Health Literate Organization, the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (NCLAS) in Health and Health Care, and evidence from the field, Pumpkin Vine LLC offers the following services:
- Staff training on organizational health literacy
- We provide training to orient staff to organizational history and their role in maintaining a health literate organization. Trainings can be tailored to specific departments.
- Staff training on plain language
- We provide training on how to communicate in plain language and in culturally and linguistically appropriate ways.
- We consult on designing organization-specific evaluation tools to assess health literacy of materials.
- Assessment of and consultation on improving organizational health literacy
- We conduct assessments of organizations’ organizational health literacy and provide recommendations for improvements. We also conduct quality improvement evaluations using widely accepted frameworks (e.g., Plan-Do-Study-Act) in healthcare.
INDIVIDUAL HEALTH LITERACY
According to Sorensen and colleagues (2012), individual health literacy 'entails people’s knowledge, motivation and competencies to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information in order to make judgments and make decisions in everyday life concerning healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life during the life course.' Given that health literacy development is heavily reliant on opportunity for building these skills and those with poor social and structural determinants of health have fewer opportunities to build these skills, it is important that, in addition to adapting their policies and practices to meet the needs of individuals with low health literacy, organizations also invest in resources to build their patients/consumers/communities' health literacy skills. Pumpkin Vine LLC offers the following services to assist with this:
- Workshops to improve individual health literacy
- We provide group-based workshops designed to improve individual’s health literacy skills. These workshops can be tailored to workshop participants’ characteristics (e.g., people who are pregnant, newly migrated families).
- Patient materials and products to improve health literacy
- We provide consultation and review of materials and products designed to improve individual health literacy and (where applicable) make recommendations for improvements.
- Available for keynote address and guest speaker opportunities on health literacy and other subject matter expertise for all audiences.
- Consultation on
- Health literacy instrument selection
- Assessment of instruments, protocols, and interventions for inclusive health
- Including health literacy in research design
Dr. Fleary has a strong interest in developing and disseminating evidence-based digital tools for building individual and organization health literacy and is actively seeking collaborators for these projects. Additionally, if you are interested in conducting health literacy-related projects or seeking a health literacy expert to collaborate with on research projects, please reach out to Dr. Fleary to discuss the possibility of an academic collaboration.
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