We believe that the way we communicate with people is key to their good Health Literacy. Ensuring that we are a Health Literacy friendly organisation is both beneficial for us and the people we aim to serve.
We will therefore make sure that our communication with the people who use our services is guided by the following principles:
1. Our processes make it easy for people to communicate with us in lots of different ways; by letter, email, online forms, telephone and face-to-face. By communicate we mean
- How they contact us;
- How we contact them;
- How they ask us questions;
- How they make complaints;
- How they receive information from us.
2. Our staff members and volunteers offer help to everyone as a matter of routine e.g. when filling out forms, giving directions;
3. Our staff members and volunteers speak clearly to people, using short sentences and everyday words and they avoid the use of jargon;
4. Our staff members and volunteers take responsibility for people’s understanding of their spoken communication and use techniques to check people’s understanding by asking “Am I being clear?” rather than “Do you understand?” (Teach Back and Chunk and Check)
5. Our staff members and volunteers take every step needed to make sure that people can understand information and instructions including accessing interpretation services when necessary;
Our written information follows good practice guidance for writing clearly and in Plain English, and uses recommended design principles