October marks Health Literacy month, so throughout October the library and knowledge service will be sharing key information and resources
to support understanding and skills around this important topic.
Definitions
But first, what is health literacy? The World
Health Organisation describes health literacy as knowledge and competencies
that enable people “to access, understand, appraise, and use information
and services in ways that promote and maintain good health and
well-being for themselves and those around them”.
The U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention has also refined the definition of
health literacy by dividing it into personal health literacy and organisational
health literacy:
- Personal health literacy: “the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.”
- Organisational health literacy: “the degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.”
These definitions emphasise that healthcare organisations
have a role to play in supporting individuals to access and interpret health
information.
Examples
In 2015, Rowlands
et al. sampled nationally available health materials in England, such as
education leaflets, medicine labels and reports related to public health. They
used data from a survey assessing literacy and numeracy skills to evaluate
whether these materials matched the competencies of the UK population. They
estimated that the literacy skills of 43% of adults aged 16-65 fell
below the threshold needed to understand and interpret the textual
information of the health materials. For materials containing numbers, they
calculated that 61% of adults would not have the combined literacy
and numeracy skills needed to understand the materials.
What could low health literacy look like in the real world? Some
examples of the
impacts of low health literacy include:
- Someone not attending a cancer test because they couldn’t find the right department – not knowing that radiology and X-ray indicated the same thing.
- Someone spraying their inhaler on their neck because they had been told to spray it on their throat.
- Someone who stopped taking their diabetes medication because they couldn’t understand the instructions.
Why is health literacy important?
As you can imagine, when people struggle to understand
health information it can have a range of negative impacts:
- It limits people’s ability to make well-informed decisions about their own health and can mean they suffer worse health outcomes.
- It may lead to missed appointments, inappropriate use of A&E, wasted medications or avoidable hospital stays, which also impacts the NHS financially.
- It widens existing socioeconomic inequalities, especially where people face barriers to education, internet access, digital devices or information in accessible formats.
- People may feel embarrassed, frustrated or helpless when they struggle to understand the information given to them.
What can be done?
There are many tools and techniques that can be used to
improve health literacy. These topics are covered by guides from organisations such as the Patient Information Forum and the NHS Alliance. Look for further blog posts over the coming days where
we will highlight tips for staff to support patients' health literacy.
To find out more, you can also register for our upcoming
training session about health literacy awareness, on 7th October on
Teams, by finding the course on MTW Learning.
