Health and Literacy Compendium: Introduction: Background

Health and Literacy Compendium Home Page

Background

The National Work Group on Cancer and Literacy was founded in 1992 by the National Cancer Institute and the AMC Cancer Research Center in order to raise awareness about the impact literacy has on health communication, and to expand research and practice on the health needs of adults with limited literacy skills. In 1996, recognizing literacy's impact on health problems in general, the National Work Group reformulated itself as the National Work Group on Literacy and Health. Also in 1996, three federal agencies, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institute for Literacy (NIFL), all members of the National Work Group, came together as the "Intergovernmental Partnership on Cancer and Literacy." Out of this partnership and the National Work Group’s efforts have come a number of recommendations for projects, including the recommendation to create this resource guide for health and literacy education.

The Health and Literacy Compendium is one resource guide for the health and literacy fields. While other resource guides are available, this guide tries to fill a unique niche by including the literacy curricula, student-generated materials, and Web sites commonly used by literacy educators, with the background research and the materials development information from the health field. The Compendium is meant to encourage teachers and health educators to think about ways to disseminate and make known to others the resources they find valuable. The Compendium is also meant to inspire people to create new materials, as gaps in the Compendium may represent gaps in information currently available in the field. The Compendium is available as a Web document on http://www.worlded.org/us/health/docs/comp/. As a Web document, the Compendium is particularly well suited for regular updating.