Health Literacy

Congratulations to the 2024 IHS Health Literacy Award recipients for the individual and team categories!

Health Literacy Individual Award

Recognition of an IHS employee that demonstrates high commitment and effort to enhance effective communication with those with limited health literacy.

Andrew Graham, Public Health Educator, Pawnee Service Unit

Andrew Graham uses creative methods to effectively communicate with patients with limited health literacy. He created an interdisciplinary Performance Improvement (PI) project to help identify communication barriers between patients and medical providers. The project identified patients with low literacy scores, which lead to one-on-one education and goal setting to improve their outcomes. Most recently, Andrew joined with the Medical Clinic to provide a metabolic/weight loss clinic to focus on patients with high BMI. Working with each patient, he created structured, individualized exercise programs that met their abilities and needs. Patient feedback after interacting with Andrew has been very positive.

Andrew actively collaborates with all healthcare team disciplines to ensure that all team members know best practices for communicating with patients with limited health literacy. He consistently goes above and beyond in his interactions with patients, showing patience and understanding when explaining complex medical information such as blood pressure and glucose monitoring and how to record and document these readings accurately. Due to his efforts, the Pawnee IHS patients are overcoming health literacy barriers and improving their overall health.

Health Literacy Team Champion Award

Recognition of IHS team that demonstrates innovative, practical solutions, and contributes to effective communication to empower people to make informed decisions to improve their health.

Gallup Service Unit, Happy Teeth Translation Gallup Indian Medical Center

• Lula Curley, ES, DA
• Tamana Begay, DDS
• Valina Chee, ES, DA

The Gallup Indian Medical Center Dental Department too often sees young children presenting with Early Childhood Caries. To help draw attention to this issue, they worked with McMillen Health and Delta Dental to translate a book, "Happy Teeth," into Navajo and English. The collaboration aims to reach parents and create a fun and interactive lesson on oral health best practices. They will be working with the hospital's pediatric and OB/GYN departments to distribute the books. They hope that families will incorporate the lessons at home, leading to increased knowledge they may have never been exposed to, particularly in the Navajo language. We are fortunate to live in a community where there are many speakers of the Navajo language, and parents are inclined to pass on this beautiful part of our culture. Ultimately, we want the youngest in the community to have lower rates of early childhood caries, with parents focusing on oral health and recognizing baby teeth are important to a little one's overall health.