Health and wellbeing remain out of reach for billions of people globally. Redefining the concept of health literacy.
Health and wellbeing remain out of reach for billions of people globally. This seminar will outline new systematic approaches to public health and health services interventions that are rapidly co-designed to ensure they are locally owned, needed, and wanted, and are easily implemented and scaled.
While the foundations of this work include epidemiology, quality improvement, and implementation science, the most fundamental elements for effective public health interventions are deep understanding of individual-and community-level health literacy (people’s ability to understand, access and use health information and services), as well as local ownership and authentic co-design with consumers through to policymakers. Inadequate understanding of local needs, health services contexts, and policy drivers leads to research that is not needed, not reproducible and not implementable; that is, research waste.
The seminar will outline the research journey from redefining the concept of health literacy, to an ARC Linkage grant, to national and international impacts on research, practice and policy.
Seminar hosts:
Professor Russell Gruen
Dean, ANU College of Health and Medicine
Professor Christine Phillips
Associate Dean, Health Social Sciences
About the speaker
Distinguished Professor Richard Osborne, PhD
NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, and Director, Global Health and Equity, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
Prof Richard Osborne led the development and implementation of the Ophelia (Optimising Health Literacy and Access) process. Using existing and new research methods and tools, his team developed a systematic process that has been widely implemented in Australia and in 20 other countries. At the end of 2022, the World Health Organization, in partnership with Richard’s team at Swinburne University, released a major report Health Literacy Development for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases. This report delivers practical what-to-do how-to-do guidance for health literacy development to build, at scale, contextually relevant public health actions to reduce inequity and the burden of NCDs on individuals, health systems and economies. The report has been classified as a WHO Global Public Health Good.
