There are a variety of tools to assess health literacy - in patients and within organizations. Click on the links below to access these resources!
Assess Your Patient's Health Literacy
The Health Literacy Tool Shed is made available by Boston University, with funding provided by the National Library of Medicine. This tool shed contains over 100 health literacy measurement tools and is updated quarterly. You can search the measures by health literacy domain, category of disease, approximate administration time, and population in which the measure was validated (ranging from Adolescents age 10 - 17 years, and Older Adults age 65+ years).
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) toolkit provides resources that can be used in adult and pediatric health care settings to ensure that systems are in place to promote the health literacy of all patients. It contains 21 Tools that are aimed at improving written and spoken communication, self-management and supportive systems, and additional resources such as worksheets, PowerPoint presentations and sample forms.
Assess Your Organization's Health Literacy
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a variety of tools for healthcare organizations to use that can help gather data by assessing the environment, structures and processes to identify opportunities to improve health literacy. There are also valuable resources to help organizations with training staff to ensure they understand health literacy, culture and communication, and with developing patient education materials that are easy to understand by patients with diverse health literacy levels.
