Blueflower Arts / Taylor Mali
WHO recognizes health literacy – the ability to access, understand, appraise and use information to make healthy choices – as an important determinant of health. Health literacy empowers people, which makes a significant contribution to people-centred health care – an important step towards achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
“Health ought to be a skill,” said Taylor Mali. “I think we’re discovering that if people in society made some tiny changes to the way we teach health and consider the importance of kids’ health and nutrition, we could see some huge results.”
Teaching – creating new understanding
Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the slam poetry movement. Before becoming a full-time poet, he spent 9 years in the classroom teaching everything from English to history to math. He has performed and lectured for teachers in over 50 countries.
“I still consider myself a teacher,” he said. “I just have a different kind of classroom. Teachers and poets are both sort of midwives. It’s their job to birth new understanding and epiphanies. In that sense, there’s little difference between being a poet and a teacher.”
“The type of poetry that I write is a dance between blunt truth and beautiful, transcendent writing and imagery. You always want to balance your poem between what we call the clouds and the anchors; it’s going to be more effective than if your poem is nothing but deep philosophical truth. That way people don’t feel too bombarded and are willing to listen.”
‘An apple a day is not enough’, Taylor Mali’s poem about the need to bring health education and health literacy into every subject of the school curriculum, was written and released in 2010. It focuses on the need to improve health literacy and teaching healthy habits to children by showing them a healthy example – at home and at school.
Health literacy – an enabler for healthy choices
‘The choices you make every day have the biggest impact in the biggest of ways’ is one of the lines from the poem that still rings true despite being written almost 12 years ago. It reflects the importance of individual choices that affect our health and well-being and that are often not medical, but rather social, cultural, political, psychological or economic.
Harnessing these behavioural and cultural insights (BCI) helps us to better understand the drivers of and barriers to achieving the highest attainable standard of health. This is a specific focus for improving the health of people in the WHO European Region, outlined in the European Programme of Work, ‘United Action for Better Health’.
Cross-national survey
Health literacy is an important element of this work. Since 2019, the WHO Action Network on Measuring Population and Organizational Health Literacy (M-POHL) has been conducting a cross-national survey in 17 countries to create comparative data on health literacy levels in order to build a strong foundation for future action.
The results of the survey, alongside recommendations for countries, were presented at the side event on health literacy in the framework of BCI at the WHO Regional Committee for Europe in September 2021. The report on the survey results, as well as recommendations for policy, practice and research, were presented to a wider audience on 8 November 2021.
