Highlighted Resource for October 15, 2025: Updating Health Literacy for a New Decade in Public Health
In honor of Health Literacy Month, the ADL is highlighting an article about how the concept of health literacy has expanded to address different ways that patients interact with health systems.
The updated definition of health literacy in Healthy People 2030 points out the ways that health organizations are responsible for making their information accessible and understandable, as an essential part of health literacy.
To learn more, check out the ADL’s October 15 Highlighted Resource: Updating Health Literacy for Healthy People 2030: Defining Its Importance for a New Decade in Public Health
Highlighted Resource for October 1, 2025: Health Inequalities at the Intersection of Race and Poverty in Southern Appalachia
Western North Carolina’s rural areas in Southern Appalachia face many ongoing health challenges, and limited data about health in this region can make it difficult to assess.
A recent article in the NC Medical Journal analyzes ten years of survey results about health of residents in Southern Appalachia, describing how health factors differ across the region and in comparison to the rest of North Carolina.
To learn more, check out the ADL’s October 1 Highlighted Resource: Health Inequalities at the Intersection of Race and Poverty in Southern Appalachia: A Community Health Needs Assessment Panel Survey 2012-2024
Highlighted Resource for September 15, 2025: Trends in workplace violence for health care occupations and facilities over the last 10 years
Workplace violence in healthcare has been discussed with increasing frequency since the COVID pandemic.
A recent study from the UNC Sheps Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy examines how healthcare workplace violence has changed over the last decade, by occupation, industry, and facility.
To learn more, check out the ADL’s September 15 Highlighted Resource: Trends in workplace violence for health care occupations and facilities over the last 10 years
Relaunch of the AHEC Digital Library
The NC AHEC Digital Library (ADL) has been a critical component in the training, retention, and continuing education of North Carolina’s health workforce since its inception in 1999. On June 23, 2025, a new and improved ADL will be launched. Notably, the ADL will introduce a simplified and more efficient search function, called a discovery service, which will work more intuitively, similar to the functionality of the Google search engine.
The current ADL features a vast array of resources, including thousands of individual databases, journals, books, and research guides; currently users must search these resources individually, leading to multiple searches before the user can access the needed information. The new ADL’s discovery service will allow users to search in all these resources at once. This makes searching easier, faster and more efficient; it also increases user satisfaction, as the user can be sure that all the relevant information will be presented in the search results.
In addition, the new ADL will feature a Publication Finder to browse journals and databases individually. Users will also be able to create a personal profile to save their searches and bookmarks in one central place, which adds to efficiency and ease of use. The ADL will be upgraded in other ways as well: It will feature an entirely new interface, with an attractive, contemporary design and intuitive user experience. In addition to all the visually and experientially-apparent upgrades, the new ADL will feature new back-end architecture, for improved speed, security, and reliability.
Signing into the ADL will change as well. While some North Carolina institutions will allow for single-sign-on (SSO) access, most users will access the ADL through the MyAHEC portal. For that reason, users who do not currently have a MyAHEC account should plan on creating onebefore the week of June 22, 2025.
“The newly relaunched NC AHEC Digital Library will be a major improvement in the way our users interact with the thousands of resources we have in our collection,” said Sarah Kimmel, MLIS, the Director of Library Services for NC AHEC. “The new ADL will make it easier to search everything in our universe, and to keep all their searches together in the user’s profile, making the ADL an entirely new experience and learning tool.”