The AMA Foundation is expanding its campaign to improve health literacy

The AMA Foundation is expanding its campaign to improve health literacy in response to two reports that show that nearly 90 million Americans adults have trouble understanding medical terms and directions.

The expanded campaign includes a planned summit of health leaders in winter 2005 to address improving health literacy in clinical settings. The Foundation will also expand distribution of health literacy "toolkits" for physicians and will host a new series of training sessions this fall for its national health literacy facilitators program.

"Improving health literacy has been a longstanding cause for the AMA, and we fully recognize the scope of this terrible national problem, as outlined in the IOM and AHRQ reports," said AMA Foundation President Duane Cady, MD. "Limited health literacy is a serious obstacle that comes between millions of Americans and the health care they need."

In 1998, the AMA was the first national organization to recognize that limited patient literacy is a barrier to medical diagnosis and treatment, and the AMA Foundation took up the issue shortly thereafter. The 2005 health literacy summit will be preceded by distribution of at least 5,000 additional copies of "Health Literacy: Health Your Patients Understand" – a "toolkit" for physicians that includes educational materials, videos, buttons and other resources to help them lead health literacy efforts at their practices, clinics and hospitals. More than 10,000 of the toolkits are already in physicians' hands.

The training session this fall will prepare facilitators who lead seminars around the country to help health care professionals understand, recognize and address low health literacy in patients. Eleven teams have been trained and more than 20,000 health professionals have been reached collectively through the toolkit and seminars.

Learn more about the summit and the Train the Trainer program or request a copy of the toolkit online or call 312-464-4200.