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In this episode of our Forward Focus podcast, Health Forward Communications Intern Tiana Ford visits with KCMO Health Department experts Dinyelle Baker and Connie Farakhan about how organizations can advance health literacy. They also discuss the KC Health IQ program, which aims to address real-time critical health issues in our community through partnerships and education.
Read a transcript of our conversation below. Please note the transcript was auto-generated. Some typographical errors may have occurred.
Tiana Ford, Health Forward Foundation:
Welcome to the latest episode of Forward Focus — where experts from Health Forward Foundation discuss race, class, health, inclusion, and share stories from resilient communities in the Kansas City region. My name is Tiana Ford and I’m currently a communications intern here at Health Forward. I’m also a senior at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, and I’m studying biology. Recently, some local leaders from the Kansas City Missouri Health Department reached out to share a little about their health literacy efforts. We decided this was a conversation we might want to record and share with our community partners. Enjoy.
Dinyelle Baker, KCMO Health Department:
My name is Dinyelle Baker. I’m the program manager for the KC Health IQ Program at the health department. I work with the health literacy program, which we go out into the community to make sure that we’re providing health literacy information to our community partners as well as our target populations. Then I also work with our health Disparities program, which is a capacity building program for small local businesses as well as community-based organizations where we go out and provide resources and tools for them because that’s where a lot of people go to get their information, the food, the resources, and their tools.
Connie Farakhan, KCMO Health Department:
Connie Farakhan. I am in the role of the lead health educator for the health literacy program, and I’ve been in this role for a little over two years, and primarily my focus has been trying to educate general community, but also community organizations and even more specifically service providers and healthcare providers so that each can communicate more clearly with those that they serve.
So to start things off, can you guys both talk about what health literacy means in simple terms?
Sure. Health literacy has to do with speaking plain language and officially the definitions for health literacy. For personal health literacy is where individuals can find, understand, and use information and service to inform health related decisions and actions for themselves. But there’s also an organizational health literacy, and that is when organizations can equitably enable individuals to find, understand and use information and service to inform health related decisions and actions for themselves and others.
I hope that was plain enough. So it’s basically health literacy is to make sure that everybody understands the information that is being presented to them on a basic level so that they can interpret it and utilize it.
So when you guys bring up having things be basic for people to understand and using plain language, if more organizations were focused on making their communications clear, what do you think Kansas City’s health system would look like?
So health literate communications would allow a more even playing field for all healthcare providers would be talking to clients at a level that they can more easily understand and people would be more able to take actions to help themselves to be healthier.
Can you guys talk about why the healthcare system is so hard to understand? To begin with,
The current health systems, including healthcare, were based on outdated structures that did not consider communities
And the layout of the communities that we serve now are different. So when these systems were put into place, the population looked different and those changes have not been made. So this is why the layout looks, how it does, and the barriers to cares that we currently have.
As you guys mentioned, a lot of different barriers. How would you say health literacy relates to health equity?
So health literacy is a matter of health equity in all systems really. Some necessary steps to achieve health literacy include developing systems that operate as health, iterate organizations that make health literacy a priority when sharing information and resources internally and externally and utilize the national class standards or what’s better known as culturally and linguistically appropriate services as a guide to provide equitable, understandable, and respectful quality of care and services that are responsive to diverse cultural health beliefs, practices, and preferred languages and other communication needs.
As we discuss health literacy being a matter of health equity, can you guys talk about the KC Health IQ initiative and how it all got started?
Yes. The KC Health IQ program got started because of Covid COVID-19. So we are a COVID program based on two federal grants. We have a grant from the Office of Minority Health, which focus on our health literacy as well as a grant from the Center of Disease Control, which focus on our health inequities and health disparities. So under these two grants, we focus on different target populations, health literacy. We focus on the African descent and Asian descent populations and health disparities. We focus on the Latinx Hispanic populations as well as the low socioeconomic status individuals. So that includes African-American Asians, native Americans. It is a population that includes a couple of other minority populations. Our target population for the KC Health IQ program, we have 14 target zip codes that we target and we go out and do capacity building and work in those communities, those zip codes.
Of those 14, we have four that overlaps between the two programs. So our populations are 6 4, 1 0 8, 1 10, 1 11, 23, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 34, 27, 28, and 30. So we do cover a large array of the Kansas City Greater Metropolitan area. The KC Health IQ program also has three main areas that we focus on when we’re going out and doing our work, which is providing health education to community members to increase health literacy. We also are working on creating sustainable and resilient community partners and resources. So for our nonprofit organizations, our community businesses and different things like that, we want to get out there and provide sustainable resources for them. And we also are collecting data collection on measurable data, things that we can report back to our funders and the things that we can tell our story on the work that we’re doing at the health department. So those are some of the information about our program.
And you guys mentioned that this work started at the beginning of the pandemic, and of course so much has changed since then. So how has your work continued to evolve over time?
So we have continued to evolve with K-C-F-I-Q is a big component of our evolution is working with our community partners, so making sure that we get out there and that we’re working with our organizations health and social service providers that we’re working with our mental health providers because that is something that came out of covid. Also, working with our healthcare providers to work on self advocating for our clients as well as making sure that our healthcare providers are understanding the needs of the community that they serve. Way that we’ve developed is, we’ve talked about myths and misconceptions. Covid was something that happened kind of quickly, and so we have some of our minority populations that were already hesitant about things because of previous things that these populations have experienced. So we worked on dispelling myths and misconceptions with the Hispanic and the African-American populations specifically, we worked with healthcare providers to increase the numbers, workshops and things that we were doing with them to make sure that they are listening or hearing the correct feedback from their clients.
So get in there, talk to our healthcare providers, ask them are they taking the time to meet with their clients and ask those questions, making sure that they understand how to utilize the information that’s being provided to them. So those are some of the things that we’ve done. We also created a patient notebook. So there is a patient notebook that they can take with them to the doctor, and it has things in there for them to be able to write down your medication, talk about your family history, a section for you to write down questions. Because a lot of times when you go into healthcare providers, you go in with a plan and you come out feeling like you didn’t accomplish anything. So this is a way to make sure that you hit all those key components that you set out and thought about so that when you go into your healthcare provider, it is a comprehensive visit and you feel good about the information that you shared and the information that you received.
We do capacity building, excuse me, with small businesses. So we provide grant writing and grant management training, project management for those community-based organizations to make sure that the next time a pandemic happens, they are not the first ones to have to close their doors so they can stay open. They know how to stay open, they know how to keep their employees and their customers safe and different things like that. So we provide those tools and resources for them. So there’s a lot of things that have evolved due to the pandemic. There’s a lot of great things that have come out of this. We have actually became a resource in the community, which is amazing because they come to us to ask for things and ask questions about things. So it’s a partnership that is working. Great. So those are some of the things that we’ve developed based on the way that the pandemic has evolved.
So you guys have done a really good job and gone into great detail talking about all of the resources that you’ve put together and the specific people that they’re designed for. So for people that might be in need of these services, where can they go to find all of these resources that you’ve mentioned?
So they can send us an email at Health iq@kcmo.org. They can also get on the health department’s website, our YouTube page. We have our videos out there, health literacy videos. We have them in different languages. We have videos about covid and pregnancy. We have videos about diabetes. So we have all those tools and resources out there. If they’re interested in participating in our community advisory board, they can send us an email at Health iq@kcmo.org and we could send them the invite, the invitation for our community advisory board. We meet once a month, the third Friday of every month from 10 to 11. So we would love to have community partners or people that are just interested in what we’re doing to come and check us out. So if this is a virtual meeting, we do meet in person quarterly. So every once every three months we do do an in-person meeting.
We do have a toolkit that we provided that is for community partners as well to help them make sure that the information that they’re providing is in plain language. Because a lot of times when people create materials, they put too much information in there. And so learning how to make sure that that information is put in a pamphlet the correct way, where people will retain it and can understand it, and it’s just not a whole bunch of words on paper. So we have a toolkit that would assist people with that as well. So they can just reach out to us by email or they can check out some of those resources online that we have. We’ll also be rolling out an e-learning, so that will be posted as well. I’m thinking that we’ll attach that to our YouTube page, but we most definitely will send that to our listserv and our community partners and talk about it during our CAT meetings as well.
And when you say e-learning, are those training modules for the public or to just become more health iterate?
Yes, exactly. So they are training modules where you can get in and you can go through. So they talk about what is a contusion, the difference between using a word like contusion and using the word like bruise. So they’re where you can get in and learn how to do that plain language discussions and what do we have teachback methods. There’s like six different core things that to focus on, and you can get in there and kind of get some of that information and that knowledge for yourself. It asks you a couple of questions, takes you through a couple of examples and different things like that. So it is interactive.
So as you guys are focused on wanting to make organizations more health literate, what advice would you have to offer to nonprofits and healthcare providers who are wanting to become health literate organizations?
So some key recommendations for other organizations would be to start by working to become a health literate organization by maybe developing health literacy policy or process that requires training for their staff, maybe implementation of class standards and other changes and ongoing updates for improving health literate communications, including some resources like language access or other barriers and making sure they have things in other languages and even considering people’s personal barriers if they have hearing or vision issues and so forth. And they could also refer to several other things like the National Action Plan for Health Literacy or the Institute of Medicine for, they have 10 attributes that kind of give organizations ideas of what they might strive for in order to become health literate organizations. And there’s plenty of other references out there with respect to health literacy that they could refer to.
And I believe you guys are working on a six point plan in policy blueprint in order to help organizations become more health literate. So can you talk a little bit about that?
So we’re working on organizational health literacy policy for the health department. So we’re working on something for our internal agencies, but we have did a presentation and are utilizing a six point plan, which was provided for us through a Unity point health guidebook for health literate organizations. So those six points that will really help organization become health literate include 0.1 will be engaging leadership. So getting leadership involved in creating a health literate organization so that they understand what that means. A lot of people, I think that it’s bigger than what it is, but it is really simplistic. It’s just making sure that the information and the things that you provide to the community are at a level that they understand and that people have access to those tools and those resources. Another thing is preparing too, is preparing the workforce. So what we’re doing internally, we’ve done a whole lot of health literacy workshops with our staff internally as well as externally to get them on board so that they understand what health literacy is and how you implement it in an organization.
So then we have the care environment, which is for healthcare providers. And the main thing about that is talking to your organizations, talking to your healthcare providers so that they can talk to the clients that they serve and making sure that they hear them and they’re providing them tangible things that they can do. Some people say, okay, I’m taking medicine, but I don’t know why. So answering those why’s and showing them how to implement this medicine, not just say, Hey, you’re going to take this and you talk to your pharmacy about it. They might want to talk to the doctors about it. How do I take this medicine? Will it be a good thing for me to take with this medicine? Then this might make me ill. So what else can I take with it to make sure that it doesn’t give me the stomach trouble that we know that comes with the medication?
So different things like that involving the populations. So getting the buy-in from the community. When you’re talking about African-Americans populations or Hispanic populations, what do they need to make sure that they have that buy-in with that health leader organization? What’s going to make them make sure that they understand the information and the tools and the resources that they’re receiving? What is going to empower them to feel that they can self-advocate for themselves? They can ask those questions and get that respect with those responses, and someone doesn’t tell them that they’re, and different things like that. So how do you bridge those barriers? And then there’s verbal communication and reader-friendly material. So reader-friendly material is a big thing. A lot of people try to put a lot of information into a document. I understand there are some key things that needs to be there, but it also has to be visually pleasing and it has to be at a reading level that everybody can understand. When you put a lot of information on the paper, people just see a lot of words. So you want to make sure that the key things are there and that the white space is proper, is correct. You can have too much white space where they’re not even looking at the words, they’re looking at the white space on the paper. So all of those little things are nuances that will help make sure that you can become a health literate organization.
Again, we do have a lot of resources and trainings that we’ve provided online on the city of k CMOs, health department’s YouTube page actually, and we can share additional information following this activity, this podcast, if anyone is interested.
You guys mentioned that you have a YouTube page full of resources, which I’m sure is very helpful for visual learners like myself. So can you guys talk a little bit more about that?
So our YouTube page has probably been around for what, 2022? 2021, at least a year and a half, about a year and a half to two years. And we were able to put, so we had all of our workshops and trainings that we were doing, and they were all virtual because a lot of people wasn’t coming into locations and different things like that. So we realized that we could reach more people and help more people if we’re able to post those trainings and workshops online. So then that’s what we did. We posted them on YouTube. So on our YouTube page, we have a lot of different things. We have providing clear plain language with numbers. We have videos in different languages like Swahili, Somali, just different languages where people can look at videos that they might’ve had questions about for covid, like how to eat healthy. What else? This like workouts. There’s a couple of different videos
On there. Yeah, we have a lot of things too that help to dispel myths like a pediatric video for people who are hesitant to get their child vaccinated. For example. One of our key focus areas is part of our grant and Health IQ is reaching those who are hesitant to get the covid vaccine because we know that even though some people who’ve gotten vaccinated still may get covid, however, we know also that they probably will not get as ill or have to be hospitalized if they’re vaccinated. So we encourage people to continue to get vaccinated. And other things on the YouTube include trainings specifically for, as Danielle mentioned, for providers, for social service workers
For a barbershop series.
We have our barbershop series information there, but we have probably about 20 or so trainings and at least five videos online that people can easily access. And the videos are really short. Only a minute.
I really appreciate how accessible you guys are making all of your videos for the public. You mentioned that you have videos for multiple different languages, and I’m curious about who you guys work with to get all these videos translated if there’s a specific organization that you guys hire.
So we work with a couple of community partners that we have contracted. They’re local small businesses, so HLM, which is a health literacy media contractor that we worked with. We worked through Jewish Vocational Services, which is a local organization, so we just work. We worked with Maddie Rose, Guadalupe Centers, different organizations around the area to help with our translation services. We’ve also had internal staff that are fluent in multiple languages that have been able to help us in our efforts as well.
Have you seen that organizations that are more health literate, that the patients in those communities have better health outcomes or do they become more involved in their treatment plans? Are they more autonomous or just overall do they have better health outcomes as opposed to organizations that haven’t adopted the same health literate policies?
So this information is fairly new for us because again, this program is fairly new, but we are seeing that people are the clients, they are more happy to talk and have those conversations and they are making behavioral changes based on the organizations that are trying to implement some of these health literate policies and procedures. So it’s kind of too soon to really tell about a long-term goal for this. But right now, as the short-term goals, we’re seeing those big steps. People are asking for things, they’re asking for the provider notebook, they’re talking to their client. They’re saying that their healthcare providers are actually listening to them. So I think this is great. That’s coming out of covid, and so we’ll just have to see how this all continues for a long-term goal. But for right now, for a short-term goal, we’re absolutely seeing those behavioral changes based on organizations that are implementing some health literacy policies and organizational policies. We just have to keep at it, and I think if everyone keeps at it, eventually we’ll get there. So our message is if you want our help, we are here and our goal is to help in any way that we can to improve health outcomes for everyone.
So if I would leave you guys with something, I would say just be conscious of making sure that you’re speaking to people on the levels that they can understand and that the information, if they look like they don’t understand, ask them, follow-up questions. Try to provide that additional resources, point of context, point of references for them. Because a lot of time people understand things when you reference things for them. So that will be something that I would say that this is not something that is hard to do, but it does take thought to do it. And so it takes that thought and that consideration to make sure that you are providing health literary information. The other thing that I would say is that we are accessible. We’re here, we’re ready to work. So if you have any questions or you need any resources or tools, please reach out to us. We can be reached at our email address is Health iq@kcmo.org.
Thank you guys so much.
