REACH develops solutions in close collaboration with civil society, municipalities and clinical practice.
REACH’s research is largely based on both global and local partnerships with institutions and organizations within research, civil society, and the established health sectors.
These partnerships make it possible to identify needs and develop interventions in collaboration with our target groups, thereby ensuring relevance and supporting the transfer and sustainability of REACH’s research results.
At REACH, we operate with three types of partnerships:
Long-term partnerships focused on larger projects with multiple scientific outputs. These may include, for example, key stakeholders in major intervention projects and data owners in multi‑study collaborations.
Defined partnerships centred on a single scientific output or process, such as standalone publications, joint supervision teams, small collaborative projects, feasibility or pilot studies, and participation in steering committees or advisory groups.
Long-term partnerships focused on developing and testing solutions in and for practice. In the Innovation Labs, we take our point of departure in the needs and challenges experienced by citizens, professionals, or organizations and work bottom‑up to develop solutions that can then be examined scientifically.
Purpose
The Development Center for Health Literacy (UCSK) is an innovation lab within REACH. The collaboration aims to build organizational health literacy in Aarhus Municipality, thereby creating practice-oriented knowledge about health literacy in a municipal context.
Description
UCSK is a two-year (2024–2026) collaboration between REACH and Aarhus Municipality, building on the Danish Health Authority’s work with health literacy as an approach in the Danish healthcare system.
All UCSK initiatives takes off from the municipal reality and the specific needs and barriers of a defined target group. The results can always be implemented directly into the municipal practice in which they were developed. At the same time, UCSK generates knowledge and tools that can be scaled up or adapted to other contexts and disseminated to other organizations or initiatives.
The initiatives often start as small-scale trials or pilot projects that can later be developed further. In other cases, UCSK integrates health literacy into established municipal initiatives as a framing or perspective approach, which can subsequently form the basis for systematic development and evaluation.
Partners
REACH maintains close relationships with a number of international research groups and continuously works to expand the centre’s international network and collaborations through concrete research programmes and projects.
REACH places particular emphasis on international collaborations focused on the theoretical foundations of health literacy, as well as the development and testing of methods and approaches for designing and evaluating interventions.
