Co-design and Implementation Science for Impact: The Ophelia (Optimising Health Literacy and Access) process
Description
The Ophelia (Optimising Health Literacy and Access) process is an internationally applied evidence-based system for co-designing, implementing, and scaling up interventions. This masterclass delivers training that will advance your skills in generating and applying health service innovations and public impacts to accelerate lasting impact in partnership with communities, people with lived experience, practitioners, and managers.
The Ophelia process provides a practical, evidence-informed way to put the National Health Literacy Framework into action. It is documented in the 2022 WHO Report on Health Literacy Development for the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases which is classified as a WHO Global Public Health Good publication. Ophelia has been applied in over 30 countries in diverse health, education and social care setting, including in multi-country and country-wide EU4Health initiatives, migrant populations, First Nations people, including populations that experience complex chronic health equities.
“Ophelia uses practical methodologies to understand and build on local knowledge and wisdom, and international evidence to co-design, develop and implement health literacy-informed interventions that are accessible, sustainable and useful for the practitioners and the communities they serve.”
Distinguished Professor Richard Osborne,
La Trobe University
Who should attend?
The Masterclass is open to anyone interested in learning how to co-design and implement transformations in health and social services to achieve outcomes via evidence-based methods, tools, and process.
Participants include clinicians, health professionals, community health practitioners, public servants, policy makers, researchers, local government, and workers in social services, such as housing, employment, and sport, and people working with groups that experience disadvantage or marginalisation.
What skills are developed?
By the end of the Masterclass, participants will be able to:
1. Critically analyse complex public health and service-delivery challenges using the Ophelia process.
2. Synthesize research evidence, routine data, lived experience, professional expertise and local knowledge to identify priorities and contextual influences.
3. Lead meaningful partnerships and codesign with communities, patients, practitioners, managers, policymakers and other stakeholders.
4. Operationalise Ophelia findings into feasible, equitable and sustainable interventions, program theories and implementation plans.
5. Strategically apply Ophelia’s implementation, evaluation and quality improvement cycles to support adaptation, learning and scale-up.
6. Critique measurement and evaluation approaches for contextual validity, bias, deficit framing and potential epistemic injustice.
Presenters
Distinguished Professor Richard Osborne, Global Health and Equity Development, La Trobe University
Distinguished Professor Richard Osborne is a NHMRC Investigator Fellow (L3) in the Health Services Research stream. Over the past 20 years, his teams have developed Ophelia for wide-scale intervention development and implementation, and created measurement instruments to be implemented globally. These include the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ), and eHealth Literacy Questionnaire (eHLQ) which are used in more than 1600 studies in over 100 countries, including in the ABS Australian National Health Survey. Richard has practical experience in a wide range of health sectors including community, First Nations, migrant, hospital and health policy settings. He is the Australian representative to the UNESCO Chair in Global Health and Education, an advisor to the WHO, and has delivered health literacy capacity building in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
Associate Professor Melanie Hawkins, Global Health and Equity Development, La Trobe University
Associate Professor Melanie Hawkins is a Principal Research Fellow at La Trobe University’s Global Health and Equity Development Hub and an internationally recognised expert in health literacy, co-design, and health service improvement. With more than 20 years of experience in public health and health services research, she has contributed to the development of widely used tools and methodologies including the Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLQ), eHealth Literacy Questionnaire (eHLQ), Conversational Health Literacy Tool (CHAT), and the Optimising Health Literacy and Access (Ophelia) process. Melanie co-authored the Ophelia Manual and leads Ophelia masterclasses internationally, supporting organisations and communities to design equitable, context-responsive health interventions that improve outcomes and reduce health inequalities.
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