October is our month! It’s Health Literacy Month. Health Literacy Month is a time for organizations and individuals (that’s you and me!) to promote the importance of understandable health information. The theme for Health Literacy Month 2015 is “Be a Health Literacy Hero.” It’s about taking action and finding ways to improve health communication. Health Literacy Heroes are individuals, teams, or organizations who not only identify health literacy problems but also act to solve them.

Previously on the the Slowchathealth blog, Shaun Bowes wrote at length about Health Literacy, putting it into a historical context, defining it, and stating it’s importance. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out. A question that we posed that week was “Can you define Health Literacy in 140 characters or less”. You rose to the challenge and came up with some great suggestions. In fact, Shaun created a Storify link to all of the responses that week.

You might like to recognize Health Literacy month by getting students to describe what health literacy looks like to them. You might provide them with information to encourage them to advocate for those less health literate. You could invite Health Literacy heroes from your school or local community to speak to your students about the health concerns that they have identified and attempted to solve. Whatever you do, it would be great for you to share it with other #healthed teachers.

Check out these great videos from OPHEA Canada aimed at health and physical literacy for students:

In advance of a month of Health Literacy, Shape America tweeted out this link, with a small selection of resources that might be useful to you as you prepare the month ahead.

This list of resources from the US Department of Health & Human Services is useful for those of you putting health literacy content online.

The Institute of Medicine provide an email subscription to their Roundtable of Health Literacy content that might be of interest to you.

Here are this weeks slowchat questions:

Q1 Health Literacy Heroes identify health problems & act to solve them. In what ways are you a Health Literacy Hero? #slowchathealth

Q2 Health Literacy Heroes identify health problems & act to solve them. What are you doing to create future Health Literacy Heroes? #slowchathealth

Q3 What super powers do Health Literacy Heroes have? #slowchathealth

Q4 Complete the sentence. Kryptonite is to Superman as (blank) is to Health Literacy Heroes. #slowchathealth

Q5 Nominate your health hero here. #slowchathealth