Background: Health care professionals need more and better training about health literacy and clear communication to provide optimal care to populations with low health literacy. A large number of health literacy and clear communication practices have been identified in the literature, but health professions educators, administrators, and policymakers have lacked guidance regarding which practices should be prioritized among members of the health care workforce. Objective: This study sought to prioritize recommended health literacy and clear communication practices for health care professionals. Methods: A Q-sort consensus method was used among 25 health literacy experts to rank a previously identified list of 32 health literacy and clear communication practices for health care professionals. Mean ratings for each of the 32 practices were compared using t -tests. Key Results: Mean ratings for the 32 practices fell along a spectrum from higher to lower importance. The eight top-rated practices formed a cluster, and seven of these items demonstrated clear consensus, whereas one item may have been influenced by one or more outlier rankings. Conclusions: Although a large number of health literacy and clear communication practices have been recommended in the literature for health care professionals, this is the first known study to rank such practices in terms of importance. The top-rated items can be considered a core set of practices that all health care professionals should learn and routinely use in clinical settings. These consensus opinion results will help health professions educators, administrators, and policymakers to direct potentially limited resources toward improving training in patient-centered communication, and when designing curricula, practice standards, care delivery models, and policies for health care professionals and systems to improve patient outcomes. Future studies should empirically confirm the relative value of the ranked items in terms of patient-centered outcomes. [ Health Literacy Research and Practice . 2017;1(3):e90–e99.] Plain Language Summary: This is the first study to rank the most important things that health care workers can do to communicate more clearly with patients. A group of 25 experts ranked 32 items in order of importance. The list can be used to improve training for health care workers.

Limited health literacy is recognized as contributing to racial/ethnic and other health disparities through mechanisms of poor understanding and adherence, and limited access to health care. Recent studies have focused on interventions to address literacy gaps between patients and healthcare providers, focusing on communication techniques and redefining the responsibility for closing gaps. Cultural differences between patient and provider, if left unaddressed, have been shown to contribute to poor health outcomes through misunderstanding, value conflicts and disparate concepts of health and illness. The dual challenges of limited health literacy and cultural differences are likely to increase with an expanding, increasingly diverse and older population. There is evidence that training providers to attend to both issues can reduce medical errors, improve adherence, patient-provider-family communication and outcomes of care at both individual and population levels. The two fields continue to have separate trajectories, vocabularies and research agendas, competing for limited curricular resources. We present a conceptual framework for health professions education that attends simultaneously to limited health literacy and cultural differences as a coherent way forward in training culturally competent providers with a common skill-set to deliver patient-centered care that focuses on health disparities reduction.

Introduction: Improving education about health literacy for health care professionals has been recommended, and many US family medicine residency programs have developed such curricula. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of health literacy curricula for health care professionals. This pilot study aimed to determine whether a longitudinal health literacy curriculum for family medicine residents could achieve long-term sustained improvements in health literacy knowledge and clear communication practices.

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This Viewpoint describes why people need health information that is easy to understand to make informed decisions about health care and why this is necessary to avoid systemic racism.