Best Selling Books by Jill Thompson

While trick-or-treating on Halloween night, Hannah Marie meets her Scary Godmother and a host of creepy creatures.

Community-based peer support (CBPS) has been proposed as a potentially promisingapproach to improve health literacy and reduce health inequalities. Peer support, however, is described as a public health intervention in search of a theory, and as yet there are no systematic reviews exploring why or how peer support works to improve health literacy. This review (191 pages), by Harris et al (2015) for the National Institute for Health Research, is a participatory realist synthesis and is aimed at developing a better understanding of the potential for CBPS to promote better health literacy and reduce health inequalities. Studies written in English describing CBPS research/evaluation, and related papers describing theory, were included. The researchers concluded that peer-support programmes have the potential to improve HL and reduce health inequalities but potential is dependent upon the surrounding equity context. More explicit empirical research is needed, which establishes clearer links between peer-supported health literacy and health inequalities. Table of contents: * Plain English summary * Scientific summary * Chapter 1: Background * Chapter 2: Methods * Chapter 3: Analysis within programmes * Chapter 4: Cross-case analysis and synthesis by stage of programme development * Chapter 5: Synthesising engagement between peer supporters and participants * Chapter 6: Results * Chapter 7: Discussion * Chapter 8: Conclusions and recommendations * References * Appendix 1: Abstract sift sheet * Appendix 2: Case studies for each cluster * Appendix 3: Study characteristics: data extraction tool * Appendix 4: Outcomes chaining for programmes * Appendix 5: Data extraction template for programme stages.