11 Facts About Health literacy

Since health literacy is a primary contributing factor to health disparities, it is a continued and increasing concern for health professionals.

Patients with low health literacy understand less about their medical conditions and treatments and overall report worse health status.

The UK's National Institute for Health literacy Research recommends involving patients and non-academic members of the public in writing plain language summaries of research articles.

Young and multidisciplinary field of health literacy emerged from two groups of experts: physicians, health providers such as nurses and health educators; and Adult Basic Education and English as a second language practitioners in the field of education.

McMurray states that health literacy is important in a community because it addresses health inequities.

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For example, studies have shown that the increased prevalence of poor health and low health literacy has resulted in a greater use of emergency services by homeless individuals.

When patients with low health literacy receive care that is tailored to their more limited medical knowledge base, results have shown that health behaviors drastically improve.

The relationship between the disease and health literacy level is in part because of an individual's ability to read English, evaluate blood glucose levels, and communicate with medical professionals.

Diabetes health literacy research is needed to fully understand the burden of the chronic disease in Vietnamese-American communities, with respect to language and culture, health literacy, and immigrant status.

EHealth literacy describes an individual's ability to search for, access, comprehend, and appraise desired health information from electronic sources and to then use such information to attempt to address a particular health problem.

Effective health literacy programs are created with cultural competency, and individuals working within health institutions can support individuals with low health literacy by being culturally competent themselves.