Community Health Literacy Training

For this award of $25,000 P. I. Advocates 94, Inc. PIA will teach and/or improve peoples computer skills in accessing high quality web-based health information and simultaneously improve their understanding of health literacy and the importance for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. We will delegate full attention to training as many people as possible doing the period of this contract which is from January 2021 to April 31 2021. PIA is introducing this project as community level health literacy training. Through our community position we are committed to combating cultural differences and disparities impeding appropriate healthcare. We have developed the ability to identify comprehension levels of our targeted populations mostly 89 and will use medlineplus.gov as a teaching tool. We have found medlineplus.gov easy for navigating and explaining health information written at a 6th grade reading level. As a supporter of NLMs and the research program we will use NLMs health information databases. Facilitators will utilize our proven hands-on computer training in PowerPoint slides format to accomplish project goals. After twenty years of offering these workshops we have found that health information housed in The National Library of Medicine/NIH databases can empower people to make informed decisions about their health. We have also found that very few of our targeted populations are unaware of these health resources. Our project is an easy-to-learn hands-on educational program designed for community folk, especially the underserved. Conducting our own needs assessment, we have discovered that certain population segments in our targeted communities are more likely to have low general literacy along with low health literacy. We have also noticed that some individuals within these segments are not even aware of the importance of controlling risk factors for disease infections. In a lot of these settings people exhibited trouble associating risk factors with personal actions. This funding will support two outreach teams two facilitators per teama lead facilitator and an assistant facilitator. Each outreach team members have studied CDCs online health literacy classes, and all have adequate computer skills. Both teams will follow the latest COVID-19 prevention guidelines and will be tested at least biweekly.