Health Literacy Program for Fiona: An Overview and Analysis of Design

This report provides an overview of a health literacy program tailored for Fiona, a 76-year-old woman living alone and experiencing health concerns related to arthritis and fear of stroke. The program utilizes a video-based educational strategy to address Fiona's specific needs, offering information on the causes and prevention of stroke, as well as exercises for arthritis pain. The report emphasizes the importance of health literacy design principles, including accessibility and relevance to the patient's health needs. It highlights the program's cost-effectiveness and convenience, enabling Fiona to access the educational resources from home. The report also references relevant research on health literacy and its assessment, underscoring the significance of health literacy in promoting and maintaining good health. The chosen intervention is image and chart based to ensure that the patient finds it interesting and easy to follow. This assignment also focuses on the value of video based educational strategies in health literacy programs.

Overview of the health literacy program for Fiona
Health literacy is one of the integral parts of healthcare and it helps an individual to
access as well as use all the health related information as per the requirement. It is a cognitive
multidimensional concept that determines the ability of individuals to understand the health
information (Batterham et al. 2016). Being a literate person does not mean that he/she might
have much literacy about health related data. Even, having short knowledge about health
information might not be helpful for any patient. In this purpose, health literacy program is
extremely helpful to promote as well as to maintain a good health and it is developed through
organised health education (Nutbeam 2015). A proper health literacy program is implemented
on the basis of some principles. Thus, health literacy design principles are essential while
implementing the health literacy program. According to the health literacy design principles
it is the first step to consider the accessibility of the patient. Importance of health literacy for
public health is becoming increasingly evident (Beauchamp et al. 2015). Considering the
condition and location of the patient the health literacy idea is generally chosen. It is also
checked if the health literacy program can be repeatedly accessed as per the necessity of the
patient. If a person is capable to access the health literacy idea whenever required, then only
it will get the success. Most importantly, the program is arranged as per the health need of the
patient so that it can be helpful to understand the information related to the particular health
need of the patient. Finally, it is also checked if the outcome of the health literacy program is
achieving the goal or not. The development of instruments and other tools to assess
individuals’ health literacy level is also found in many researches (Kowalski et al. 2015).
Before choosing the appropriate health literacy idea, all these factors are checked so that it
can be successful enough in addressing the particular health need of the patient.
In this case, Fiona is a 76 year old lady and after the death of her husband she is
living alone. However, she lives in a beautiful place but that is far away from the city and

even the hospital and other services are also far away from her house. She also does not feel
comfortable in visiting doctors regularly. But, she suffers from pain due to arthritis and as her
father lost his mobility and speech during 70s due to stroke, Fiona also fears about this and
does not want to be dependent. She was not having any idea about the cause of stroke.
Considering this fact, a health literacy program sing a video based educational strategy has
been chosen for her case which will describe the causes and facts of stroke thoroughly so that
she can overcome her fear. In this program she will also be able to know about some useful
exercises that will help her in the pain of arthritis.
This presentation would be a successful intervention as it will be cost effective and
the patient will be able to access the video anytime comfortably sitting at her home. She will
not require going anywhere. This video is aimed to provide her a brief education about the
causes of stroke and precaution along with some exercise techniques. Patient will find it
interesting as it will be an image and chart based video. The idea of designing the resource
also helped me to understand the need of health literacy in addressing health issues.

References
Batterham, R.W., Hawkins, M., Collins, P.A., Buchbinder, R. and Osborne, R.H., 2016.
Health literacy: applying current concepts to improve health services and reduce health
inequalities. Public Health, 132, pp.3-12.
Beauchamp, A., Buchbinder, R., Dodson, S., Batterham, R.W., Elsworth, G.R., McPhee, C.,
Sparkes, L., Hawkins, M. and Osborne, R.H., 2015. Distribution of health literacy strengths
and weaknesses across socio-demographic groups: a cross-sectional survey using the Health
Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ). BMC Public Health, 15(1), p.678.
Kowalski, C., Lee, S.Y.D., Schmidt, A., Wesselmann, S., Wirtz, M.A., Pfaff, H. and
Ernstmann, N., 2015. The health literate health care organization 10 item questionnaire
(HLHO-10): development and validation. BMC health services research, 15(1), p.47.
Nutbeam, D., 2015. Defining, measuring and improving health literacy. 総総総総, 42(4), pp.450-
456.