Health Literacy Collaborative
The Health Literacy Collaborative was created to facilitate communication, interaction, and coordination between health literacy services across Milwaukee County. The collaborative’s objectives include increasing awareness of existing health literacy efforts, maximizing the use of existing resources by avoiding duplicative efforts, supporting community health literacy activities, improving awareness of healthy behaviors, promoting cultural competency in health literacy efforts, identifying gaps in community efforts to provide continuity of healthy behaviors, and enhancing external resources to improve health literacy.
Currently, the Collaborative is working with the Milwaukee Lifecourse Initiative for Healthy Families (LIHF) to address the significantly higher rates of infant mortality among African American women in Milwaukee County. By engaging the families of pregnant women and fathers-to-be as well as increasing health literacy and education regarding prenatal and infant health, new mothers are more likely to receive the necessary support to meet their own health needs and those of their child. Visit the LIHF website to learn more about the critical disparity between black-white birth outcomes and for more information about the LIHF project.
Visit these sites to learn more about other health literacy initiatives in Wisconsin:
- Health Literacy Wisconsin
- Summary of the 4th Biennial Wisconsin Health Literacy Summit
- Health Literacy Special Collection: Tools and Resources for Health Literacy Initiatives
- Institute for Healthcare Improvement Tools: Health Communications Toolkits: Improving Readability of Patient Education Materials by Doug Seubert of Marshfield Clinic
- Wisconsin Department of Health Services Health Literacy Profile
- National Coalition for Literacy’s Health Literacy page
