After finishing the Self-Assessment Checklist, you should have a pretty good snapshot of your organisation’s strengths and areas for improvement.
The next steps are to:
- explore ideas for action to include in your Action Plan
- complete your Health Literacy Action Plan template.
Setting Priorities: What to do first?
Your completed Checklist will help you decide what is most important for you to start working on. You may choose to work on the areas for improvement indicated in the Checklist, or you may want to continue to focus on some of the things you are already doing well.
Health literacy is literally everywhere.
berny, the link.
When deciding which areas you want to work on, it may help
to ask:
- How important is this area to the work you do and your organisation’s main goals?
- What kind of resources and time would you need to make changes in this area?
- Are there some small changes you could make in an area that could have a big impact?
There are more ideas for action in Tool #10
Tool #8 is the Action Plan Template
Don’t feel that you have to tackle all the dimensions at once.
You may choose to work with just one of the dimensions or even a single action. Starting small and building on your successes is a good way to stay motivated and focused.
Exploring ideas for action
While we recommend starting with a stand-alone Action Plan, you may like to add your actions into another organisational plan in future – e.g. a continuous improvement plan, business plan or strategic plan.
Once you have decided on your priorities, you can explore some ideas that you may like to include in your Health Literacy Action Plan – for example:
- Look at different ways to get feedback from consumers
- Get some health literacy training for staff and board members
- Do a survey to see if you are reaching the people that most need your services
- Do a ‘walk-through’ of your building with a consumer to look at your signs, interview rooms, etc.
- Review a service pamphlet
- Check that your planning documents support health literacy.
Completing your Health Literacy Action Plan
This step involves transferring your priorities and ideas onto the Action Plan template, and deciding:
- who will do what, when
- what resources are needed
- how you will measure success.