Organizational Health Literacy (OHL)

OHL LogoThe WHO Action Network M-POHL is based on an advanced understanding of health literacy as a comprehensive and relational concept. Therefore, M-POHL aims not only at measuring population health literacy, but also at assessing organizational health literacy, respectively the health literacy responsiveness or friendliness of healthcare organizations. 

By focusing on healthcare organizations, health policy can choose from or combine two different strategies to improve health literacy: providing learning opportunities for people to improve their personal health literacy and investing in the developing of healthcare organizations to become more transparent and user-friendly, even for people with limited personal health literacy. A health literate healthcare organization should make it easier for all its stakeholders (patients, staff, the community it serves) to access, to understand, to appraise and to apply health-related information for maintaining and improving their health.