Poor Health Literacy

POOR HEALTH LITERACY

Health literacy has been defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions”. (Selden, C. R. et al. National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD [online], 2000). Health literacy strengthens people’s ability to access health care services such as navigating providers and services, engaging in self-care and chronic-diseases management, sharing personal information such as personal health records to professional practitioners and to understand simple mathematical probabilities and risk.

Health literacy is important as it helps increase the quality of health by which encourages people to live a better health lifestyle. Low level of heath literacy has been linked to poor health outcomes (i.e. higher rates of hospitalization). Health literacy empowers people as it improves their access to information and their capacity to use it effectively.

Having poor health literacy associates with multidimensional health care problems such as not being competent enough to understand treatment plans, medical regimens, health care costs, poor health self-care and has increasing risk of hospitalization. People with poor health literacy have less life expectancy than people who have high health literacy. There are several group of populations here in Australia that are more likely to experience poor health literacy and they are: older adults, racial and ethnic minorities, Aborigines, people living in isolated and rural areas, people who didn’t complete high school, people with low income levels, people who can’t speak English properly and people with compromised health status. All in all, education, language, culture, access to resources and age are all factors that affect a person’s health literacy skills.

There are several factors that leads to poor health literacy that greatly affects health which are unrecognized properly and therefore should be address immediately. One of the factors of poor health literacy is people with poor health literacy are said to be more likely not to attend important health preventative measures such as flu shots and immunisation compared to people with adequate health literacy. According to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, 2000, “People with low health literacy skills avails health care services when they become sicker” which tells us that they don’t know different alternatives of preventing a certain disease by which increases their rate of hospitalization which then leads to expensive health care costs. Another factor is that people with low health literacy are more likely to have chronic conditions and have lesser knowledge of how to prevent it and manage a certain disease which worsen up their condition which then leads to different complications. And the last factor is that people with poor health literacy are having problems with having a conversation with a professional as they feel ashamed of their literacy skills affecting their health mentally as they always try to hide their difficulties of understanding health information to hold over their reputation.