North Carolina Health Literacy

Easy-to-Read Health InformationNew Resource to Refer Patients To: Easy-to-Read Health Information from MedlinePlus.
Creating Patient Education MaterialsToolkit for Making Written Material Clear and Effective (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)
Always Use Teach-back Training ToolkitLearn to use teach-back to support patients and families throughout the care continuum.
Mental Health Literacy (CDC)New Training Resource for Librarians: Mental Health Literacy Training Resources (CDC)

The North Carolina Health Literacy website serves as the information hub for health literacy resources and efforts at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as throughout the state of North Carolina. Our work includes outreach to rural and underserved communities. We offer workshops and training for students, educators and health care workers on health literacy principles. We also provide information on strategies and tools to incorporate health literacy into practice in order to improve health outcomes.

NC Health Literacy was established by the Sheps Center for Health Services Research in 2007. Today, we are an integral part of the Health Sciences Library. The Health Sciences Library supports the work of the University to enhance the quality of life for all people in the State by connecting people everywhere with knowledge to improve health.

Our Mission

Our mission is to promote health literacy in order to improve health outcomes for all North Carolinians. On our site, we offer a number of vetted resources that will help you incorporate health literacy in your practice, such as:

Videos and tutorials on assessing and improving health literacy
Quick-start guides and patient education materials
Health literacy happenings at UNC and beyond
News, journal articles, and emerging trends in health literacy
Health literacy presentations

Data map showing health literacy rates in NC

The Health Literacy Data Map provides an interactive, searchable, national map of health literacy estimates for neighborhoods throughout the United States. The map was developed by Dr. Gang Fang and Dr. Stacy Bailey of UNC, Chapel Hill. Click anywhere on the map to get started.

Health Literacy at UNC

At Carolina, we are dedicated to help improve health outcomes by promoting health literacy awareness and skill development to both health care providers and consumers. On this page you will find information about health literacy activities that support our mission on campus and beyond.

To contact the Health Literacy Team at UNC, see our “Contact Us” page.

Engaging for Health in Rural and Underserved North Carolina Communities

Map of library branches and counties where workshops were held

In spring 2019 a team of four librarians at UNC’s Health Sciences Library (HSL) including Nandita Mani, Michelle Cawley, Terri Ottosen, and Megan Fratta, received an All of Us Community Engagement Project Award from the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) to conduct a health literacy outreach project to reach rural and underserved communities in North Carolina. The aims of the project were to:

Train public library staff on providing consumer health information services in their communities and build their capacity to make use of National Library of Medicine resources to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities.
Enable public library staff to offer the Engage for Health program at their libraries. This program empowers patients to ask questions of their doctors, take an active role in their healthcare, and enable them to better communicate with their healthcare providers in order to make informed decisions.

Using data from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, the team identified five libraries in areas of the state with low health literacy levels to partner with. We led two-part train-the-trainer sessions at five libraries. The first part of the training was designed to increase library staff capacity and knowledge around health literacy and consumer health information resources. We introduced two consumer health information resources: MedlinePlus.gov and NCHealthInfo.org, both of which are excellent starting points for health information searches.In part two, we introduced library staff to the “Engage for Health” program, which is intended to be presented to community members to encourage them to engage in conversation with their health care providers. It covers the importance of asking questions, includes a role play script to practice asking questions, and then introduces several trustworthy health information resources including MedlinePlus. This “program in a box” curriculum is available to download from NNLM’s website and includes a toolkit with presentation slides, speaker notes, role play exercises, pre-post evaluation forms, and promotional materials. Two of the libraries held at least one Engage for Health session prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through the 5 train-the-trainer sessions, we reached 57 public library staff from 12 public libraries throughout the state. The map provides a geographic representation of the communities that were reached through this grant project. In evaluations, participants commented that the training was informative and helpful, particularly when assisting people with health questions, but also useful for themselves, friends, and family.

Impact Measurement and Visualization

The Impact Measurement and Visualization (IMV) team and librarians at the Health Sciences Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) have partnered with NC Health Literacy to create these data visualizations representing publications by UNC-affiliated researchers on the topic of health literacy. These publications were collected by searching PubMed and Scopus bibliographic databases. The two data visualizations below present collaborations between UNC Schools and the health literacy topics examined within the publications.

Organizational Analysis

Visualization represents collaborations within UNC, regarding the field of health literacy (last updated May, 2022).

Topic Analysis

Visualization represents the range of health literacy topics published by researchers at UNC. The topic words were selected from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms associated with each of the publications (last updated May, 2022).

Articles by UNC Scholars on Health Literacy

The following are the most recent articles published in PubMed by UNC scholars on topics related to health literacy. To see a complete list, click on the “PubMed Search Results” widget below.

PubMed Search Results

Racial Differences in Shared Decision-Making About Critical Illness February 26, 2024
CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: The results of this thematic analysis showed that critical care clinicians missed opportunities to acknowledge emotions and value the knowledge of Black caregivers compared with White caregivers. These findings may inform future clinician-level interventions aimed at promoting equitable shared decision-making.
Deepshikha C Ashana
Why Climate Literacy Is Health Literacy February 2, 2024
Health problems of global warming are daunting in severity and magnitude and will only get worse. Yet literacy about these problems is poor and plans to alleviate them are too early in development to be responsive to current levels of global threat and individual need. Social and ecological determinants of health and illness are exacerbated […]
Larry R Churchill
Health Literacy and Health-care Resource Utilization Following Gastrostomy Tube Placement in Pediatric Patients February 2, 2024
CONCLUSIONS: In pediatric patients undergoing GT placement, higher ecologically-measured health literacy and neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage are associated with decreased health-care resource utilization, as evidenced by decreased ED visits. Future studies should focus on the role of individual parental health literacy in outcomes of pediatric surgical patients.
Adesola C Akinkuotu
Development of a Pilot Literacy Scale to Assess Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behaviors towards Climate Change and Infectious Disease Dynamics in Suriname December 22, 2023
Prior research has shown that climate literacy is sparse among low- and middle-income countries. Additionally, no standardized questionnaire exists for researchers to measure climate literacy among general populations, particularly with regards to climate change effects on vector-borne diseases (VBDs). We developed a comprehensive literacy scale to assess current knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors towards climate change […]
Meghan Matlack
Impact of Educational Background on Preoperative Disease Severity and Postoperative Outcomes Among Patients With Cervical Spondylotic Myelopathy December 16, 2023
CONCLUSIONS: Among patients undergoing surgical management for CSM, those reporting a lower educational level tended to present with longer symptom duration, more disease-inflicted disability and pain, and lower QALY scores. As such, patients of a lower EL are a potentially vulnerable subpopulation, and their health literacy and access to care should be prioritized.
Nitin Agarwal

Looking for educational opportunities on health literacy? The CDC offers a list of training opportunities on its Find Training page. It also offers a list of training from organizations other than the CDC.