The following was posted on several listservs.
“Health Literacy Colleagues,
I’m pleased to share news and information about a freely available, one-hour web course on using plain language in health. Please see the brief bulletin, along with links to the full news release and link to the training web site and related tools, below. We invite you to take advantage of this resource, and share it with others.
Cordially,
Sarah M. Greene, MPH
Group Health, ITHS launch free health literacy e-course
Truly “informed” consent is hard: Many consent forms are written at college level, while the average American adult reads at the 8th-grade level. To help address this problem, the University of Washington’s Institute for Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) and Group Health Research Institute have jointly produced a new Web course in using plain language for health research:
http://prism.grouphealthresearch.org
. The ITHS is part of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA). Creation of the online training was supported in part by the ITHS grant, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).
Jessica Ridpath, Group Health Research Institute research communications coordinator, presented this new online resource at the Health Literacy Annual Research Conference, in Bethesda, MD. October is Health Literacy Month, and President Obama recently signed into law the Plain Writing Act of 2010. Like the Plain Writing Act, the new Web course is based on the principles of plain language: a communication style centered on the audience’s needs, abilities, and levels of literacy and numeracy. The online training will broaden the reach of the Program for Readability in Science and Medicine, or PRISM. The Web course is freely available to anyone. Researchers can see how to use plain language in study materials through the course’s many concrete examples.
Ø Full news release:
http://www.grouphealthresearch.org/newsroom/newsrel/2010/101018.html
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Ø Online Training:
http://prism.grouphealthresearch.org
Ø Toolkit: www.grouphealthresearch.org/capabilities/readability/readability_home.html
Sarah Greene | RESEARCH ASSOCIATE III
GHRI, Group Health Cooperative
PHONE 206-287-2989
CELL 206-819-3579
E-MAIL greene.sm@ghc.org
www.grouphealthresearch.org
Group Health Research Institute
1730 Minor Ave, Suite 1600
Seattle, WA 98101
