Friday, April 4, 2025
4/4/2025
King County COVID-19 Health Literacy Project - King County (KC) is a large urban region, home to over 2 million people with increasing diversity and over 170 different languages spoken. Over 40% of KC’s population are people of color, and more than half of children are children of color. Latinx, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders (NHPI), Black/African American, and American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) populations in KC are experiencing COVID-19 rates that are 2 to 5 times higher than those in non-Hispanic white people. This project will focus primarily on those disproportionately impacted populations in South Seattle and South King County, areas with high proportions of people of color and low-income residents as well as the highest rates of COVID-19. These areas also correspond to census tracts in the highest (top 4th) social vulnerability based on the 2018 CDC Social Vulnerability Index. The proposed project will advance evidence-based organizational and personal health literacy strategies to assure that COVID-19 mitigation strategies are shaped and owned by impacted communities, resulting in reduced racial/ethnic COVID-19 disparities. Primary partners include HealthierHere (HH) and their Community Partner Network (over 120 CBOs), Public Health Seattle-King County (PHSKC) and their COVID Language Access Team (over 100 community-based translators/reviewers), and an Advisory Group (10 CBOs) and Project Partner Group (26 CBOs) of CBO’s representing Latinx, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders (NHPI), Black/African American, and American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) populations in KC. Building on existing efforts, the project will support community-driven development and dissemination of information to keep people safe and healthy. A key product will be a Health Literacy and Sustainability Plan, based on the Disparity Impact Statement that identifies populations with highest COVID-19 risk and low health literacy. The network of CBOs will provide oversight for project activities and the Health Literacy Plan’s development and implementation; engage in a community-based evaluation process; and participate in creating and implementing community-informed culturally and linguistically appropriate health literacy strategies. Partners will collaborate to co-create and deliver training and practice coaching strategies for public health, healthcare system and COVID-19 testing and vaccination providers to improve organizational health literacy in implementing COVID mitigation strategies. Finally, CBOs will work in partnership with PH to develop and disseminate culturally appropriate COVID-19 materials to impacted communities to improve personal health literacy. The project will utilize a continuous quality improvement cycle to measure impact while scaling and sustaining system transformation efforts. CBOs will conduct community interviews/focus groups or surveys to measure impact of health information approaches and materials and provide information regarding impact of efforts on patient experience. PH will monitor COVID-19 transmission and vaccination rates to identify progress in reducing disparity gaps. To ensure scale and sustainability of these efforts, The Health Literacy and Sustainability Plan will include a manual that captures lessons learned and will be broadly disseminated for use in the development of future public facing health literacy information and materials. This includes strategies to advance health literacy using the National CLAS standards as well as policy changes modeled after the Plain Writing Act of 2010. It will also include a toolkit for developing community partnerships and embedding community informed strategies in public health response efforts.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).