widely understood that improved health literacy is seen as a prerequisite for addressing health inequalities. Literacy practitioners are contributing to this key government priority. There is no explicit acknowledgment that adult education is playing a role in promoting health literacy and there are also missed opportunities for literacy practitioners to work more closely with health practitioners.
The recent changes in the NHS have created an additional opportunity for this collaboration. These involved, in April 2013, the transfer from the NHS to local government of responsibility for many public health functions within its locality. This has been accompanied by the transfer of a significant number of Public Health staff into local authorities. This means that for the first time in over forty years, lead responsibility for public health and adult learning is vested in the same organisation. If those responsible for commissioning public health programmes which address health inequalities can see that their new colleagues make a significant contribution to this agenda, might this not be the start to a new mutually beneficial form of partnership working?
The key to these new partnerships will be how a shared mutual understanding develops between public health and adult learning personnel with regard to how each might contribute to the other's priorities. This clearly requires considerable thought from both sides. However, the focus here is on literacy practitioners and suggests that literacy practitioners will need to show how their work contributes to addressing health inequalities and improving health literacy. The joint CHLF/NIACE guidance (forthcoming) will address this in much greater detail.
Skilled for Health One area where collaboration has already proved possible is shown by public health and literacy practitioners in delivering Skilled for Health (SfH). The SfH programme integrates the goals of reducing inequalities in health with those of improving the literacy, language and numeracy skills of adults. The underlying premise is that by addressing both issues simultaneously, the impact on both sets of issues is greater than the impact of addressing them independently. It was developed by CHLF's predecessor organisation, ContinYou, in partnership with the Department of Health and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. A booklet called Skilled for Health; Making the Case (Berry, 2009) accompanies the resources, and makes the case for this sort of joined-up work in much more detail.
Created with the model of co-delivery in mind, the Skilled for Health programme has been and continues to be delivered in various parts of England. In some places it has been a vehicle for enhanced collaboration between literacy and public health practitioners, but this has been sporadic. This is despite the fact that by delivering it in the manner described above it can improve learning and health outcomes. The evidence for this is an evaluation carried out by the Tavistock Institute (2009), which found, among other things, that the programme changes health behaviours, improves confidence, reduces isolation and re-engages people with learning. It can be argued that a joint programme of this nature offers a platform to build collaboration between health and literacy practitioners as well as a health literacy course which literacy practitioners could themselves offer to their learners.
Skilled for Health includes modules on healthy eating, the benefits of physical activity, sexual health, how to access NHS services and how to manage medication. It is designed to enable participants to increase their knowledge and thus make informed decisions about their own and their family's health. The resources can be downloaded from the CHLF website (see
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