Allow me to frame the following critique by quoting what my ex (lovingly) used to say to me: “You have a problem for every solution” But, I digress, Like most health communication people I’ve spent this year thinking about, writing about and re-imaging how we could have done better communicating the Covid pandemic to various “general […]
Guess what you can’t find on the NYC Covid “Latest Data” site anymore? Answer: How many New Yorkers tested positive on any given day. Nope. Gonzo. “Less pertinent” Mayor DeBlasio said this week as he announced yet another change to the way the city presents Covid data to the public. Reporting the city’s seven-day rolling […]
Yesterday Rhode Islanders received this scary alert on their phones. An old friend texted me “it buzzed my phone for 10 seconds and almost gave me a heart attack.” I was thinking back to late Spring when all the experts talking about “flattening the curve.” No one more than Governor (NY) Cuomo in his […]
It’s probably like, if you’ve been married with kids, and dogs and houses for 30 years and you find out your spouse has a second, parallel family somewhere. Or your crowd pleasing lemon cake stops reliably rising the way it always has. Maybe more like a winning backhand shot that now keeps getting tangled up […]
A main theme in my writing and teaching (my students would say “her mantra”) – is that a majority of researchers and practitioners in the field of health literacy have spent more than a quarter century identifying what people CAN’T DO. Tests and metrics of all kinds have been designed and popularized so that we […]
This week, there’s a very triggering conversation I’m following on a popular health literacy discussion list. People are talking about how best to refer to “people with low health literacy.” Take your pick – there are posts from all sides “Low” is too judgmental. How about “restricted”? Why not “needs help reading”? “Inadequate” … […]
I gave a talk last week at the Colorado Health Literacy Coalition. I was lucky enough to share the roster with Janet Ohene-Frempong. Unbeknownst to either of us we both gave talks that reflected on the limits of how we’ve viewed health literacy and people and how to broaden our lens and be more relevant […]
6th Annual Colorado Health Literacy Coalition Conference: I am speaking followed by the renowned health literacy expert, Janet Ohene-Frempong. Agenda Abstract of my talk:
Monique McCollum and her colleagues at Univ of Colorado Hospital are hosting their 6th conference online. They’re good folks, thinking about good things and….broad minded – witness they invited me!!! Preview of my talk Covid is, what I call, a “concentrated encounter” – a time of extremely distilled significances. In such times the submerged fault […]
A reader asked me to give some alternatives to deleting more complicated or technical words and simply substituting easy ones – the subject of yesterday’s post. Instead of creating a dossier of words you “shouldn’t use” try any of these: Original Sentence“The flu can be transmitted easily from one person to another.”Deletion – Substitution“The […]
©2021. Health Literacy Lab. All Rights Reserved.