ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Health Literacy Missouri (HLM) integrates health literacy and plain language to do ethical work. It describes how HLM content and services address BUROC situations, who creates plain-language content at HLM, how HLM provides its services, and how organizational culture and ethics affect HLM's work. The ethical principles HLM applies include respecting individuals' rights to make health-care decisions, a feminist awareness of the imbalance of power between patients and health-care bureaucracies, and the feminist ideal of care, which it enacts by training others to better serve those with low health literacy. The plain-language practices include reviewing documents systematically, evaluating readability and plain language in more than one way, training and empowering others to use plain language, understanding the challenges affecting audiences with low health literacy, and assessing the systems in which patients receive documents.
