Asian Health Literacy International Conference opens in Taiwan

亞洲健康識能國際會議在台灣開幕

Vice president says event advances international trend toward public health cooperation


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The 8th Asian Health Literacy International Conference opened at Changhua’s Chang Bing Show Chwan Memorial Hospital on Thursday (Oct. 27) and saw Vice President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) give an opening address that highlighted international public health collaboration.

According to the Asian Health Literacy Association (AHLA), this year’s event is the first in-person conference to be held since before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2019. The AHLA expects to host over 200 participants attending both in person and online between Thursday and Saturday (Oct. 29), when the conference ends.

This year, the conference features a key theme of “health literacy and social resilience,” which the AHLA called “timely” because many Asian countries have just reopened their borders as COVID gradually subsides. It wrote in a press release that since 2019, health literacy has helped the public in dealing with misinformation and unforeseen challenges brought by the pandemic.

The event will include debates and presentations on relevant topics, including health literacy approaches in ageing society and organizations, health literacy education and intervention, and the World Health Organization health literacy program.

The AHLA will seek to design an accreditation mechanism to advance health literacy programs at the national and community levels, increase patient engagement in promoting health literacy, and accelerate the development of digital health literacy strategies.

At the opening ceremony, Lai said in a pre-recorded speech that the conference helps establish best practices and improve healthcare services by gathering experts and scholars from across Asia. He said this is especially important as health literacy enhancement has become “a key public health policy priority shared by many countries."

He added that in 2016, the WHO committed to global health promotion with governance policies and health literacy as some of its priorities for government action.

“Health experts believe that raising health literacy is an effective way of improving public health and reducing health inequality. The 2017 National Health Interview Survey in Taiwan showed that citizens over 20 years old had a health literacy of 71.8 percent, which is encouraging,” Lai said.

“Through this conference, we will demonstrate Taiwan’s achievements in health literacy promotion and advance the new international trend toward public health cooperation, collectively establishing a global vision for health literacy and highlighting directions for future action.”

The AHLA, founded in 2013 and registered in Geneva, Switzerland in 2014, is one of the most active and respected professional non-governmental international organizations that promotes education and research in health literacy. It is headed by President Peter Chang (張武修), who also serves as a physician at the Chang Bing Show Chwan Memorial Hospital. It has more than 100 institutional and individual members and more than 15 offices promoting national health literacy in different countries.