Health Literacy: Factors, Strategies, and Implications in Healthcare

This report provides a comprehensive overview of health literacy, defining it as the ability to obtain, process, and understand health information to make informed decisions. It explores various factors affecting health literacy, including the clarity of educational materials, cultural considerations, and language discrepancies. The report emphasizes the importance of healthcare professionals recognizing and addressing low health literacy among patients to improve health outcomes, such as medication adherence and reduced hospital readmissions. Strategies for improving health literacy, such as using readable brochures, videos, and interpreters, are discussed. The report highlights the significance of cultural and conceptual knowledge, effective communication, and the role of interpreters in bridging language barriers. It also examines the Calgary Charter on Health Literacy, which outlines key skills and benefits. The report concludes by underscoring the essential role of health literacy in providing holistic patient care and improving healthcare delivery.

Nursing Degree
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Overview Health Literacy: Health literacy is the capability to gather information, read,
understand and practice information and knowledge to make proper health decisions. Health
literacy is helpful in simplifying information, circumventing waffle and encouraging patients
to ask question. There are diverse factors affecting health literacy. These factors include
health education material, clarity of the text, current health status of the patient, language
discrepancies, culturally acceptable material, formatting and style of material, sentence
structuring, utilization of illustrations and interactions during clinical procedure (Parnell,
2014).
It is important for a healthcare professional to identify a patient with less health literacy. It is
useful to provide care to patient which is understandable for the patient. It has been proved
that for the patients with low health literacy, there has been improved health outcome, if
provided care is tailored to their understanding. Health literacy can be provided to the
patients in terms of correct medication use, correct dose and dosage of medication, utilization
of health check-up, performing regular exercise and smoking cessation. Health education can
be provided to the patients with the help of readable brochures and videos. These media
proved effective in providing health education to the patients. Variety of tests including three
minutes assessments, are useful for the evaluating capability if patient’s health literacy.
Healthcare professional should intervene with patient on regular basis to understand
insufficiency of health literacy in patient. Healthcare professional should promote patients to
ask questions. Patients like elderly, ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, and persons with
low general literacy are at high risk of negative impacts of insufficient health literacy. Hence
healthcare professionals should give more attention towards such patients to reduce
medication errors, to reduce frequent rehospitalisation and to reduce duration of stay in the
hospital (Osborne, 2011).
Along with reading about health and disease, health literacy should also consider cultural and
conceptual knowledge. It should also encompass assumptions and language about health and
disease. Communication skills in the healthcare sector should be compatible with language
and culture. Communication in the healthcare sector should aim to reduce disparity in access
of quality healthcare service. Interpreters have significant role in the health literacy and all
human resources should be used to maximum extent.
Cross-cultural work environment has prominent role in providing safe and quality healthcare.
Health communication should be interactive process. Health literacy can also be described as
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set of skills, theory of behaviour change and social practice. Calgary Charter on Health
Literacy stated that health literacy include reading, writing, listening, speaking, numeracy,
and critical analysis, as well as communication and interaction skills. Benefits of health
literacy include informed choices, of health service, lessened health risks, augmented
prevention and wellness, improved navigation of the health system, increased patient safety,
improved patient care, lesser inequities in health, and better quality of life (Zarcadoolas et al.,
2012).
Cultural and conceptual knowledge: Conceptual knowledge of health literacy comprises of
fundamental literacy, science literacy, civic literacy and cultural literacy. Health literacy is a
strategy for empowerment with crucial concepts and frameworks. These include basic or
functional skills, communicative or interactive skills and critical health literacy.
Health staff and health systems have significant impact on the health literacy of patients.
Communication and assessment skills of the healthcare professionals have significant impact
on the health literacy. This communication should promote shared decision making,
information focusing on individual requirements and information which is understandable.
Other stakeholders like media, marketplace and government agencies should provide
information to patients in suitable manner. Health literate organisation status can be achieved
by providing health literacy to healthcare workforce and giving priority for partnering with
consumers (Mitic and Rootman, 2012).
Health literacy can be defined differently for different stakeholders. Individual can attend
health literacy applying skills to navigate, understand, analyse, communicate and use health
information. Health care workers can be health literate by providing information to improve
recognize and act according to the provided information. Health care organisations or
systems can be health literate allocating indiscriminate, safe, easy and quality healthcare
services and health information (Pleasant and McKinney, 2011).
Health literacy in the context of language and culture : Health literacy is a integration of
social and individual factors. Moreover, it is significantly affected by education, culture and
language. There can be inequality in health literacy due to different cultures and diverse
educational backgrounds. Difference in the education, culture and language between
information provider and information user may also lead to problem in health literacy. Hence,
health literacy is dynamic process rather than static process. Integration of health literacy and
cultural and communication competencies at individual and organisation level can facilitate
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culturally responsive, equitable, safe and high quality healthcare services. It also promote
effective communication and improvement in health literacy to enhance outcome in health
services (Coleman et al., 2011).
Health communication:
Effective communication is helpful in equality in healthcare services and provision of safe
and quality healthcare service. Insufficient health literacy is not only the problem of general
population but also healthcare professionals may encounter this problem. Few healthcare
professionals may not clearly explain health issues to the patients. Hence, such health care
professionals should improve their health literacy before involved in patient’s health literacy.
Even tough, both healthcare worker and patient are fluent in English, there may be ineffective
communication due to difference in the cultural and conceptual aspects. Health
communication is useful in solving complexities in the healthcare services and health
promotion. It is also useful in the storing health information in the form of organisational
intelligence for future use (Baker and Giles,2012). Miscommunication may lead to the lack of
awareness and acceptance of culturally unacceptable aspects. Miscommunication between
healthcare staff of different organisations may affect safety and quality of healthcare services.
Along with linguistic and cultural factors, social and political contest also have significant
impact on the communication in the healthcare sector. Hence, along with language barrier,
others aspects like disempowerment and disconnection also should be considered for
effective communication. Communication should also be established with patients outside
clinical settings to facilitate better choices for patients and having more control over their
treatment. Communication should be accommodated in such way that it should strengthen
health literacy and consequently augmenting control of patients on their health management
(Booth and Nelson, 2013).
Working with interpreters: Language barrier is one of the obstacle for effective
communication and health literacy, however it would have significant impact when there is
communication with cross-cultural sectors. Hence, there is requirement of interpreters in in
health communication and health literacy. Interpreters proved beneficial in protecting human
rights of the patients who are unable to talk English. Interpreters deserve attention, respect
and flexibility like other stakeholders in healthcare sector. It has been observed that, that
there us underutilization of interpreters in healthcare industry despite its benefits. Interpreters
have their usefulness in promoting well-being, protecting human rights and achieving cultural
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respect. Lack of interpreters may lead to the declined quality of care and associated health
outcome (Phillips, 2010).
Interpreters can be utilised in both ways. These can be utilized for communication from
healthcare staff to patients and from patients to healthcare staff. Even if healthcare provider
feels information to be provided to the patient is not complex, interpreter should be provided
to communicate concerns and questions of patient (Phillips and Travaglia, 2011).
Improvement in the health literacy can be achieved by incorporating information right from
the university level, implementing framework and intervention points and developing health
literacy program.
Conclusion:
Health literacy is an inevitable barrier for providing quality care to the patient. Adequate
educational materials and resources should be used for health literacy. Health literacy is
mainly required for patients of old age and children. It is also required for the poor and low
socioeconomic class patients. Effective communication is the integral part of the health
literacy. Incorporation of the interpreter is an added advantage for the health literacy. Health
literacy is helpful to ease the procedure of medical treatment for the patient. It is also helpful
to build confidence of patient in the treatment. In conclusion, health literacy is useful in
providing holistic care to the patient.
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References:
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The Calgary Charter on Health Literacy: Rationale and core principles for the
development of health literacy curricula. . from
http://www.centreforliteracy.qc.ca/sites/default/files/CFL_Calgary_Charter_2011.pdf
Mitic, W., and Rootman, I. (2012). An intersectoral approach for improving health literacy
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Phillips, C., and Travaglia, J. (2011). Low levels of uptake of free interpreters by Australian
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