The topic of health concerns both individuals and society as a whole. While everyone wants to be healthy there is a strong connection between income levels and where you live with your health and life expectancy. The rising costs of health care, including for diseases that could actually be prevented or better managed, such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and cancer, mean that societies and economies have an interest in promoting better health. To be and to stay physically and mentally healthy is linked to knowledge about living a healthy life at all stages. Central to achieving this is having access to health care and understanding health information. Health literacy is a basic competence and needs to be recognised as such. Health literacy levels have an impact on the efficiency of healthcare systems. People that have low health literacy tend to go to the doctor more often, to be hospitalized more often or to take inappropriate treatment or prescriptions. Furthermore, they are less inclined to take preventative measures. Fostering health literacy of all citizens is beneficial for society at large as it reduces costs for public health systems which can, then, work more efficiently for those really in need of care. Tackling the health literacy issue also means fighting poverty, social exclusion, racism and discrimination, and promoting social justice and gender equality. It provides a very strong basis to improve the socio-economic situation of many people as a healthier population in all stages of life can contribute better to the social, cultural and economic development of its community and country. Thus, it is not only about educating people in health issues but about empowering them to attain a better life for themselves and society as a whole. The objective of the HEALTH@HOME project is to help transform areas of social and economic disadvantage into sustainable, healthy communities by providing a full range of age appropriate and accessible family education resources to promote health literacy. A) Resources: These will include a suite of age appropriate family learning resources that build health literacy related to the 4 thematic areas selected - Promoting Positive Mental Health; Diet & Nutrition; Preventative Health Promotion; Social Media in the Health Sector - to include: - a collection of 12 themed comic strips for younger children, 4 for each selected theme, will be designed and produced and presented as PDFs for download and printing and as flip-books for online reading; - a compendium of 32 web-quest challenge-based educational resources, 8 for each selected theme at introductory, intermediate, advanced and expert levels for learners between the ages of 13 and 25; - a series of workshop lesson plans, tip sheets and a learner manual to raise health literacy awareness among parents and guardians - induction training programme for parents and guardians so they can facilitate and manage the family learning model developed. 2. An in-service training programme for adult educators to support their engagement with the new family learning resources developed and to ensure that they acquire the necessary skills to develop their own comic strips and Web-quest challenge-based educational resources. 3. A bespoke on-line learning environment will be developed and populated with the innovative family learning resources. All resources developed will be presented in traditional and on-line formats in 4 partner languages and made available to all interested parties without restriction in keeping with the open access requirements of the ERASMUS+ programme.
The Health@Home Project set out to develop a multi-faceted response to address current low levels of health literacy in disadvantaged communities and to ensure that key service providers were suitably trained and resourced to provide all the necessary supports to develop a robust family learning model. The project aimed to harness the full potential that the digital era offers to support health literacy through the use of on-line technology for information provision, education and training. The Health@Home consortium aimed to ensure that adult and community educators and the newly trained parent facilitators of family learning were fully supported through the provision of a suite of on-line platforms, bespoke training resources and networking aids essential to the successful achievement of their health literacy objectives.
The topic of health concerns both individuals and society as a whole. While everyone wants to be healthy there is a strong connection between income levels and where you live with your health and life expectancy. The rising costs of health care, including for diseases that could actually be prevented or better managed, such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and cancer, mean that societies and economies have an interest in promoting better health. To be and to stay physically and mentally healthy is linked to knowledge about living a healthy life at all stages. Central to achieving this is having access to health care and understanding health information. Health literacy is a basic competence and needs to be recognised as such. Health literacy levels have an impact on the efficiency of healthcare systems. People that have low health literacy tend to go to the doctor more often, to be hospitalized more often or to take inappropriate treatment or prescriptions. Furthermore, they are less inclined to take preventative measures. Fostering health literacy of all citizens is beneficial for society at large as it reduces costs for public health systems which can, then, work more efficiently for those really in need of care. Tackling the health literacy issue also means fighting poverty, social exclusion, racism and discrimination, and promoting social justice and gender equality. It provides a very strong basis to improve the socio-economic situation of many people as a healthier population in all stages of life can contribute better to the social, cultural and economic development of its community and country. Thus, it is not only about educating people in health issues but about empowering them to attain a better life for themselves and society as a whole. The Health@Home project was developed to address the above stated challenges and provided resources which will support practitioners from across Europe to tackle the primary health literacy and family learning issues in their societies. Substantial training was delivered to further support the primary objective of this project.
The topic of health concerns both individuals and society as a whole. While everyone wants to be healthy there is a strong connection between income levels and where you live with your health and life expectancy. The rising costs of health care, including for diseases that could actually be prevented or better managed, such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and cancer, mean that societies and economies have an interest in promoting better health. To be and to stay physically and mentally healthy is linked to knowledge about living a healthy life at all stages. Central to achieving this is having access to health care and understanding health information. Health literacy is a basic competence and needs to be recognised as such. Health literacy levels have an impact on the efficiency of healthcare systems. People that have low health literacy tend to go to the doctor more often, to be hospitalized more often or to take inappropriate treatment or prescriptions. Furthermore, they are less inclined to take preventative measures. Fostering health literacy of all citizens is beneficial for society at large as it reduces costs for public health systems which can, then, work more efficiently for those really in need of care. Tackling the health literacy issue also means fighting poverty, social exclusion, racism and discrimination, and promoting social justice and gender equality. It provides a very strong basis to improve the socio-economic situation of many people as a healthier population in all stages of life can contribute better to the social, cultural and economic development of its community and country. Thus, it is not only about educating people in health issues but about empowering them to attain a better life for themselves and society as a whole. The objective of the HEALTH@HOME project is to help transform areas of social and economic disadvantage into sustainable, healthy communities by providing a full range of age appropriate and accessible family education resources to promote health literacy. A) Resources: These will include a suite of age appropriate family learning resources that build health literacy related to the 4 thematic areas selected - Promoting Positive Mental Health; Diet & Nutrition; Preventative Health Promotion; Social Media in the Health Sector - to include: - a collection of 12 themed comic strips for younger children, 4 for each selected theme, will be designed and produced and presented as PDFs for download and printing and as flip-books for online reading; - a compendium of 32 web-quest challenge-based educational resources, 8 for each selected theme at introductory, intermediate, advanced and expert levels for learners between the ages of 13 and 25; - a series of workshop lesson plans, tip sheets and a learner manual to raise health literacy awareness among parents and guardians - induction training programme for parents and guardians so they can facilitate and manage the family learning model developed. 2. An in-service training programme for adult educators to support their engagement with the new family learning resources developed and to ensure that they acquire the necessary skills to develop their own comic strips and Web-quest challenge-based educational resources. 3. A bespoke on-line learning environment will be developed and populated with the innovative family learning resources. All resources developed will be presented in traditional and on-line formats in 4 partner languages and made available to all interested parties without restriction in keeping with the open access requirements of the ERASMUS+ programme.