A Health Equity Implementation Approach to Child Health Literacy Interventions

Abstract

Health and behavioural inequalities exist in all populations, including children. As a social determinant of health, health literacy is a crucial driver of equitable health outcomes in children. With the increasing calls for more actions on addressing low health literacy and inequalities, health literacy interventions to improve children’s healthy behaviours have emerged as a key strategy to reduce health inequities. However, health literacy interventions face implementation challenges impacting upon potential outcomes, and disparities in the implementation of health literacy interventions also occur. Variation exists in child health literacy intervention target groups, timing, content and formats, and there is a lack of implementation specificity, resulting in a lack of clarity about which intervention strategies are the most effective in improving health literacy, related health behaviours, and associated health outcomes. While actions to facilitate child health intervention implementation exist, to minimise further perpetuation of child health inequities, this perspective calls for a health equity implementation approach to child health literacy interventions.

Development of a Proposal for a Program to Promote Positive Mental Health Literacy among Adolescents: A Focus Group Study

“…In the category ‘ participants ’, it was consensual that the program should have as its target group adolescents from the fifth grade on, and it was advised that the class to which the adolescents belong should not be broken up, but the class should be divided into small groups during the sessions [ 9 , 32 , 33 , 36 ]. Regarding the facilitators of the program, it was recommended that a team should be formed with health professionals and education professionals, which should remain unchanged from the beginning until the end of the program implementation, and that at least two facilitators must work together to run each session, which is in line with what is advocated by several authors [ 7 , 8 , 18 , 36 ].…”

“…We are aware that adolescence is a turbulent transitional period in the life of a human being, because it is full of marked and rapid changes in biological terms, which are also reflected in mental, psychological and emotional terms, and where brain neuroplasticity is high [ 2 , 6 ]. This is why adolescence is considered a privileged stage of human development for investment in the implementation of interventions to promote mental health literacy (MHL) but especially to promote PMeHL [ 2 , 7 , 8 , 9 ].…”

Developing health literacy events: a case study of teachers designing health curricula

“…In developing health education and health literacy standards at PreK-12 levels in the USA (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.), a focus on the local and context-specific health literacies is required. School-based health literacy intervention may be an important way to address health disparities at the local community level (Naccarella and Guo, 2022). Health literacy is a modifiable social determinant of health and is influenced by local -as well as national, institutional and cultural -social inequities such as housing, environmental pollution, policing and schooling.…”

Public Libraries as Supportive Environments for Children’s Development of Critical Health Literacy

“…While there is some evidence that integrating critical HL into school-based health education may contribute to improved health outcomes in the long term [25], there are also wellrecognised barriers to schools being supportive environments for children's development of action-oriented critical HL. These barriers include schools' structural hierarchies and lack of time and space to fully embed critical HL across the curriculum [26][27][28]. The purpose of the present study, therefore, is to explore potential non-school-based settings for promoting children's critical HL.…”