Question
What is health literacy?
Answer
Health literacy is the ability to read, compute, to understand, and to act on health information. It is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.
Health Literacy affects people's ability to
- Navigate the healthcare system, including filling out complex forms, locating providers, and services
- Share personal information, such as health history, with providers
- Engage in self-care and chronic-disease management
- Understand mathematical concepts such as probability and risk
More than 36 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level. Low literacy costs the United States about $225 billion or more every year in areas of nonproductive work, crime, loss of revenue due to unemployment. The United States is spending about $232 billion every year in healthcare costs that are very specifically linked to low adult literacy skills. Low health literacy is a serious threat to the wellbeing of persons who are seeking out any sort of medical care. With the increasing diversity of the clients that we are serving in our practice, we may observe that our communication skills are less effective with people from backgrounds that are different from our own.
When we look at health literacy, it is dependent on a number of individual and systemic factors. How well can you, as a professional, communicate to the person that you are trying to serve so that they can understand you? Nearly nine out of every ten people in the United States have limited health literacy and experienced difficulty using health information to effectively manage their health and their health care. There is often a discrepancy between the health literacy level of a healthcare professional and that of an individual receiving health services. This discrepancy is a vast cause of poor communication in health and healthcare.
In addition to basic literacy skills, health literacy also requires knowledge of health topics. Individuals who have limited health literacy, oftentimes just do not have that basic knowledge about health, the body, or in some cases, they have misinformation. Without having that basic knowledge or understanding, they may not understand the relationship between lifestyle factors like diet or exercise, and how that impacts various health outcomes or disease processes. We know that medical science progresses quite rapidly. Health information that is provided in a stressful or unfamiliar situation is unlikely to be retained.
Low literacy in general, is a global crisis. It is affecting many people, and that is why it is important to address this issue and confront the facts head-on. The responsibility is ours as healthcare professionals, every healthcare professional, respiratory therapist, nurses, doctors, whomever, to communicate in what we call plain language. Plain language is a strategy for making both written and oral information easier to understand. It is an important tool for improving health literacy. Plain language is communication that users can understand the very first time they read it, the very first time they hear it. When people receive accurate, easy to use, easy to read information about a health issue, they are better able to take action to protect themselves and to promote their own health and wellness.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Health Literacy & Delivering Culturally Competent Care, presented by Kathleen Weissberg, PhD.
