On May 10th, 2016, the Amsterdam Center for Health Communication1 (ACHC) held its inaugural symposium at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR at the University of Amsterdam, with the financial support of NeFCA. During this symposium, attendees from health communication practice and science were provided with various presentations detailing the latest insights from research on effective communication strategies for people with low health literacy levels.

Topics that were discussed were whether or not health information about colorectal cancer should be provided using text or animations (Corine Meppelink) and whether or not the use of photo strips would enable elderly patients to have higher quality consultations with their GP (Ruth Koops van ‘t Jagt).

In addition, presentations were given on how to a tooltip would enable patients and doctors to acknowledge the issue of low health literacy (Jeanny Engels), how risk information should be presented and framed for people with low healthy literacy (Olga Domman), and on what improvement could be made regarding preconception care in low health literate people in Amsterdam. A series of six shorter presentations concluded this day. 2

The ACHC felt that the opening symposium was very informative and the interactive nature of the meeting means that there was an extensive information exchange between academia and practice.

The program and the presentations can be downloaded from this link.

1 ACHC was launched in January 2016 and strives to promote health through research on effective communication.

2 Presentations were given by Corine Meppelink (University of Amsterdam), Kathelijne Bessems (Maastricht University), Olga Damman (Free University Medical Centre Amsterdam), Jeanny Engels (Vilans), Mirjam Fransen (Academic Medical Centre Amsterdam), Iris van der Heide (NIVEL), Violette Jitomirskaya (Ghent University), Ruth Koops van ‘t Jagt (Groningen University), Ellen Koster (Utrecht University), Sarah Lubjuhn (The Center for Media and Health), and Anke Woudstra (Academic Medical Centre Amsterdam).