Health Literacy Resources for Communicating Clearly

National health literacy statement

This statement mainly relates to individuals and organisations working within the health sector, and can be used by organisations and individuals to drive and support their work on health literacy and to inform decision-making about what they can do to address health literacy.

Communications Guides and Resources

Clearly written Communications – The Easy English Style Guide

Easy English is a style of writing that has been developed to provide understandable, concise information for people with low English literacy (people with a limited ability to read and write words). Scope (Vic) Ltd have developed this guide and have a web page on ‘Accessible Information’ with fact sheets on Easy English and plain language.

Make It Easy: A Handbook for Becoming a Health Literate Organisation

A small, practical and actionable self-assessment tool that will guide organisations to make sustainable changes

Readability-How to produce clear written materials for a range of readers

This guide covers design and layout, areas such as the use of white space, appropriate font choice and sentence length. It also contains a readability test that aims to help determine how accessible text is to a disadvantaged reader Source: NIACE (now the Learning and Work Institute).

How to Write Easy-to-Read Health Materials

MedlinePlus offers guidelines and resources to help you create easy-to-read health materials. ETR materials are written for audiences who have difficulty reading or understanding information.

Health Literacy Guide by IPC Health, making client resources easy to use and understand.

Health Literacy Tools and resources for health service organisations

The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has a range of resources on health literacy for clinicians, consumers, executives and health service organisations to improve their health literacy environment.

Cultural Diversity

Health Translations Directory

The Directory is an online portal which provides free access to more than 10,000 translated health resources in over 90 languages. The purpose of the Directory is to improve the health of culturally and linguistically diverse communities by offering quality translated health information.

The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne – translated health information

Centre for Culture, Ethnicity and Health – Health Literacy Hub

A collection of resources that CEH has produced and collected and information on training CEH offers.

Victorian Government Guidelines on Policy and Procedures for Interpreting, Translating and Multilingual Information Online

Kids Matter: Cultural Diversity Resources for teachers, parents and carers

Readability Tools

Readability Checkers take a sample of your writing and will let you know the reading level and grade level of your text and help you determine if your audience can read your writing.

Test your document’s readability in Microsoft Word and Outlook

When Outlook and Word finish checking the spelling and grammar, you can choose to display information about the reading level of the document, including readability scores.

Hemingway Editor

Word processor and proofreading tool that can be accessed online or by downloading the desktop version of the app; and helps users write in a simple, clear, and powerful manner. It detects the presence of adverbs, hard to read sentences, complex words or phrases, and passive voice within a text.

Readability Calculator

A free online software tool which calculates readability: Coleman Liau index, Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, ARI (Automated Readability Index), SMOG. The measure of readability used here is the indication of number of years of education that a person needs to be able to understand the text easily on the first reading.

Checklists

Checklist for written information – use to make you think about what you write (HealthWest Partnership).

Ethnic Media

Victorian Multicultural Commission Community Directory

This directory is intended to be a convenient and useful online guide to local community associations and organisations in Victoria. Sort by community, LGA and focus area.

Australian Community Broadcasting Map

This interactive map can be used to search community radio and ethnic media broadcasters across Australia.

Training

Vic PCP Online Health Literacy Course

The Victorian PCP Online Health Literacy Course was launched in November 2017. It has been designed for Victorian health and human service organisations to build knowledge and skills in health literacy responsiveness.

Centre for Culture, Ethnicity and Health training

CEH offers a Health Literacy Course, online training and can tailor training to the needs of your workplace.