Health literacy in the light of 40 years of Ottawa Charter: the pathway for better child and adolescent health outcomes
Organisers
EUPHA Health Literacy Section
EUPHA Child and Adolescent Health Section
Co-organisers
Technical University of Munich
World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Health Literacy
Imperial College London
Introduction
In the 40th anniversary year of World Health Organization`s Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, this preconference will present key health promotion milestones of the past four decades, highlight the deep linkages between health promotion and health literacy, and introduce some of the European and Global efforts undertaken by WHO and regional agents to promote health literacy in research, practice, and policy to improve health and well-being of children and adolescents during their life-course.
Understanding health information and making informed health choices is increasingly seen as key to people’s well-being, especially in public health efforts and policy. In Europe and beyond, low health literacy across the social and age spectrum seriously harm individual and population health outcomes, especially for marginalized or underserved groups, making health literacy an important health promotion and prevention topic across societal settings. However, gaps in health literacy exist both within and between countries and regions, hitting poorer communities hardest.
Amplifying these challenges, crises such as pandemics, conflicts, economic instability, misinformation, and eroding public trust create turbulent conditions that severely test, and often overwhelm, people’s health literacy, making it even harder for (younger) people to find, understand, and use reliable health information. These changing circumstances and transformational process are making it urgent to prioritize health promotion and education in schools worldwide, so children can have better, healthier futures.
Objectives
This event builds on the Helsinki 2025 preconference of EUPHA HL and CAPH sections, following up with new developments, scientific insights, and the presentation and critical discussion of practical recommendations to improve school health literacy efforts in the wider school health promotion ecosystem in Europe and globally.
We want to provide insights on how to improve child and adolescent public health through school health literacy action and framed by health promotion approaches. Four keynote presentations will introduce into the WHO promotion and health literacy activities of WHO, followed by an expert round table to further enlighten these topics.