Health Literacy Month: campaigning for better health outcomes
The first of October marks the start of #HealthLiteracyMonth, a month-long campaign to raise awareness of health literacy issues and promote techniques to improve our understanding of health information.
What is health literacy?
The US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (2020) defines personal health literacy as ‘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’.
On a functional level, this means being able to read appointment letters, understand basic numeracy (like time and dosage), and follow simple medicine instructions. However, you could lose your functional health literacy by simply leaving your glasses at home or not turning on your hearing aid.
If you have a higher level of health literacy, you may be able to be more involved in your health decisions. Some refer to these levels as ‘health information literacy’ as this involves not just accessing information but appraising and using information to manage their health (De Brún, 2019). At an interactive level, you can seek out and interpret different health information, managing contradictory information and knowing what to trust. You can manage your own self-care and disease prevention and are able to help others manage their health too, for example family members.
Finally, there is critical health literacy which involves critiquing and challenging information, for example treatment routes, link health outcomes with social, cultural or economic factors, and interacting with the health system to share and develop it. Health literacy levels are not static and will change depending on situations and emotions, for example receiving bad news.
Why is this important?
The national figures show that 43% of adults in England find it difficult to understand written health information and this rises to 61% when numbers are involved (Rowlands et al., 2015). Amongst other outcomes people with low health literacy can die earlier (Bostock et al., 2012), find it more difficult to take their medicine as instructed and are less likely to engage with disease prevention like cancer screening and immunisations (Berkman et al., 2011). This impacts the NHS through missed appointments, wasted medication, inappropriate use of services, longer hospital stays and a poor patient experience, not to mention 3-5% of the total health care cost per year (£5.064-£8.44 billion in 2023-2024) (Eichler et al., 2009).
What can I do this Health Literacy Month?
If you’re new to Health Literacy, familiarising yourself with the data is a good place to start. NHS England and the University of Southampton have provided a Health Literacy Geodata tool to help you see what the health literacy levels are like in your local area (last updated early 2024).
The Health Literacy Place is a great website to learn more about the different techniques to help improve health literacy, including Teach Back, Chunk and Check and using simple language. There is also the Health Literacy e-learning course on eLearning for Healthcare which is a brilliant 35 minute introduction to why health literacy is important and using simple techniques to improve how you communicate with patients, relatives and carers.
Whatever sector you work in, this month is a great opportunity to get people thinking about their health literacy skills and where they find health information. The IHA Health Literacy Month website has a toolkit of social media graphics, posters and videos to help you promote Health Literacy awareness and use the hashtag #HealthLiteracyMonth.
Let us know what you’re doing this Health Literacy Month!