Health literacy (HL) empowers people to make better health choices. The proposed project focuses on improving HL for adolescents, with the aim of developing lifelong skills to enable them to take control of their health. This proactive and preventative approach to health will enable more people to develop into health literate adults, leading to healthier lifestyle choices, which will in turn improve general health and morbidities. However, whilst there is existing research related to adult and clinical populations, there is a lack of research regarding how best to develop health literacy in young people. The proposed internship is part of a wider Irish Heart Foundation HL Demonstration Project, registered with the World Health Organisation. This project adopts a co-design methodology whereby students, school staff and researchers work together to develop, optimise and evaluate a health literacy intervention. As this is an existing project, a significant portion of work is already underway, including the development of an interactive and engaging student experience called the ‘LifeLab’, which is based at Dublin City University. The LifeLab experience will be supplemented by a co-designed school curriculum, to develop on intervention that is sustainable and targeted to adolescents. Piloting programs will be put in place to increase the quality of intervention and the qualitative data obtain will consist of interviews from the focus group. The co-design methodology aims to create an intervention that is engaging, impactful and sustainable, with the aim to improve health literacy in young people, and ultimately health outcomes.
