What is health literacy?
Health literacy is "the degree to which an individual has the capacity to obtain, communicate, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions." (The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention)
In other words, with high health literacy skills, you can:
- Get the health information or help you need
- Understand the health information
- Make decisions based on it
- Put the decisions into action
What does health literacy look like in Canada?
- 60% of adults and 88% of seniors In Canada have low health literacy (Public Health Agency of Canada)
- People with low health literacy are more likely to be older, less educated and living in poverty
- When looking at drugs and physicians’ services, Canada is one of the top health care spenders among the 30 OECD countries, both on a per capita basis and in relation to GDP (Canadian Institute for Health Information)
What impact does poor health literacy have?
According to Health Canada, people with low health literacy have:
- Poorer health
- Lower life expectancy
- Increased number of accidents
- Higher incidence of diabetes and cardiovascular disease
- They are also more likely to misuse medication, misunderstand health information and medical directions, and increase the burden on the health care system by requiring more time, money and emergency care.
How do we improve health literacy?
There are a number of ways to begin to improve health literacy in Canada:
- Provide medical information in plain language and in ways that are accessible to adults with low literacy, language or cultural barriers
- Improve literacy in general
- Create stronger relationships between those who work in the health care system and those who use it
- Encourage partnerships between the public, private and non-profit sectors and health and literacy organizations to create resources and programs to improve health literacy—ABC Health Matters is one good example
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