The Ophelia process is a co-design process that starts with a community understanding its health literacy needs followed by genuine co-design among all stakeholders to develop and implement scalable solutions.
Project implemented: Feb 2014
Ophelia aims to enable communities to co-design, fit-for-purpose, scalable interventions to improve health and equity
Innovation is required to ensure public health programs generate real outcomes for communities. Ophelia is a systematic process to do this.
Local engagement, data collection, local ownership. Local practices/innovative intervention idnetified
Local stakeholders decide priorities. Interventions identified to impact local services & systems improvement. Testing
Health Literacy responsive interventions tested in quality improvement cycles. Wider implementation and evaluation
The co-design process is deeply engaging and empowering for community members. Many small and sustainable interventions that are meaningful to community members are generated. The Ophelia process generates a comprehensive range of individual person, family, community, practitioner through to policy interventions.
Improving health literacy in populations provides the foundation on which communities and civil society are enabled to play an active role in improving their own health, engage successfully with community action for health, and push governments to meet their responsibilities in addressing health and health equity. Meeting the health literacy needs of the most disadvantaged and marginalized societies will particularly accelerate progress in reducing inequities in health and beyond.
The Ophelia process enables communities to co-design and implement public health interventions. Ophelia enables the voice of all members of the community to be heard, captures local wisdom, then enables implementation and embedding of locally derived solutions. Ophelia was designed for global application and this is underway through WHO’s National Health Literacy Demonstration Projects (NHLDP).
A NHLDP enables countries to demonstrate through case studies, proof of concept and scaling up, ways to improve health literacy to directly generate new and improved interventions to impact on health and inequality.