26 - Health Care Literacy and Health Disparities. It Just Got Graphic!

Background: Poor health literacy coupled with health disparities can undermine important aspects of decision-making in the healthcare journey. High literacy rates do not equate to high healthcare literacy rates. Globally, healthcare literacy rates are poor. Participants will learn how to identify and locate graphic medicine as it relates to their needs and learn how graphic medicine addresses health disparities. Page samples will increase understanding of how graphic medicine reduces stigmas, feelings of isolation and directly addresses health disparities across the world.

Description: My poster "Healthcare Literacy and Health Disparities. It Just got Graphic!" represents workshops I created showing how graphic medicine addresses multiple learning styles, is cost-effective and encourages readers to move on to more difficult texts about their health topics. Graphic medicine can reach large audiences of all ages, often crossing socio-cultural barriers. Since implementing my "It just got Graphic" series, education professionals incorporate graphic medicine into curricula, use comics and zines as group activities and I use them to teach health students about specific illnesses as written from the patient or caregiver perspective.

Conclusion: Outcomes from this poster include an increased understanding and use of graphic medicine to increase health literacy as they relate to patients, medical professionals, and students. Participants will understand how to apply graphic medicine to health information systems. One of the current outcomes from graphic medicine projects includes the creation of a new group, Graphic Medicine South, which will become a conference in 2023.