Sydney Health Literacy Lab

We are a research group within the University of Sydney School of Public Health led by Professor Kirsten McCaffery FAHMS. Our mission is to give all people the opportunity to have the best health outcomes for themselves and their families.

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Research themes

Our research can be divided into six broad themes: Shared decision making; Implementation Science and Behavioural Insights; Carbon Health Literacy; Equity; Low Value Care/Overdiagnosis; Applied and Translational Health Literacy Research.

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Events

Lab members regularly present at conferences and other events both in Australia and internationally. Click below for information on upcoming events.

Events
Bespoke research

We offer bespoke health literacy research and consultancy services. This includes health literacy intervention development and testing, organisational health literacy reviews, strategy and advice, and health literacy assessments of health information and materials.

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We believe in collaboration

The Sydney Health Literacy Lab is located within the University of Sydney School of Public Health and the Westmead Health Literacy Hub. The Lab is also a founding partner of Wiser Healthcare, an Australian research collaboration investigating overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Additional collaborative partnerships exist with the Sydney Institute for Infectious Diseases, and other international researchers.

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Top tips for health literacy

We’re often asked for advice on how to improve written materials’ health literacy level. So we’ve compiled a page on our four most valuable tools that we use in our research to improve the health literacy level of our work.
If you’d like more tailored advice, you may be interested in our consultancy services.

Tips and tricks
Our work on COVID-19

Over the pandemic, we spent a lot of time as a group working on research into COVID-19. Not only on a nationally representative level, but also how the pandemic affected those who speak a language other than English at home.
You can read more about this work, and view our publications, by clicking below.

Read more about our COVID-19 work