HEALTH FILE
WHAT’S YOUR HEALTH LITERACY SCORE?
Image credit: NEWS CANADA.
By AAMINAH NAJMUS SAHAR
Health literacy includes a basic understanding of health, medicine, and medical issues about you or your family, as well as the ability to understand, research, discuss with your healthcare provider, and make the right health choice.
With health literacy you can make well-informed choices for yourself and your family, which will impact the quality of your life.
It is necessary for everyone because at some point or another, we or our loved ones may need to use healthcare services, and we need to be able to find, understand, and choose among various options. In addition to this, taking care of health is a part of everyday life, and health literacy can help us prevent health conditions, manage our health problems better, and lead an overall healthy life.
Health literacy is a stronger predictor of health status than socioeconomic status, age, or ethnic background.
It is a determinant of health, and is associated with age, gender, educational attainment, income and occupation, poverty, racial/ethnic minority status, literacy and language skills, health insurance coverage, and self-reported health.
Differences may exist in these parameters within and across population groups. These differences, along with disparities in healthcare, impact whether people can easily develop and use health literacy, and whether they have access to quality and trustworthy information and services.
Factors that contribute to low health literacy may include lower level of education and socioeconomic status, which can make accessing health information difficult; age (seniors may have difficulty in accessing and understanding health information); and language barriers (people who do not understand English or French may have difficulty in accessing and understanding health information. Emotions and health conditions can also impact one’s ability to access and understand health information.
According to the National Library of Medicine, 9 out of 10 adults struggle with health literacy.
Increasing health literacy is essential to empowering people to manage their health and advocate for their family’s and their own wellbeing, as well as reducing the burden on Canada’s health care system. According to the Canadian Public Health Association, 60 per cent of Canadian adults and 88 per cent of seniors are not health literate. Some seniors cannot follow instructions on a medicine bottle. Providing chronic patients with education on self-management combined with ongoing supervision by a case manager could create savings of over $2,000 per patient per year.
Steps to improve health literacy include understanding medical terms and having a basic understanding of the workings of the human body, keeping track of all medications being used, keeping a detailed medical history and personal history, knowing what to ask the healthcare providers, being able to find resources online to check about health conditions, drug information, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and lifestyle modifications.
Patients should be educated in detail at discharge about medication administration – dose, route, frequency, duration, and method of administration. Also about what lifestyle modifications should be followed to manage the disease and what symptoms to look out for in case of worsening illness.
In today’s world, with so many resources available online, it is essential to educate ourselves on at least the basics of health and medicine. This not only helps us understand our condition better but can also improve communication with health care providers. It may help us get an idea about what questions to ask the health care providers, and this may lead to better communication, improved lifestyle modifications, better care, reduced costs, and improved health outcomes.
However, while health literacy is an investment you are making for your health, it is important to remember that no online information should be preferred over your healthcare provider’s diagnosis, methods, and care.
You can always ask about your concerns and doubts, but recently, people have been developing a habit of thinking that they know more than their health care providers because of an online search. This is extremely dangerous as wrong choices can lead to bad health outcomes.
Aaminah Najmus Sahar is a medical writer and reviewer with a Pharm.D. In her blog Medscetera, she posts about healthcare topics. She is passionate about helping people make informed health choices.