Health Literacy: What Is It?
Imagine you’re diagnosed with a condition that you’ve never heard of before. Now, your doctor tells you that you can choose between two different medications. You don’t know what either of the medications do or the side effects. What should you do?
Hopefully, you want to learn more about both of them. If you have high health literacy, you can find information on these medications and then think about how they might impact you. If you have low health literacy, you might not even want to learn about the medications, have difficulty finding information, or be unable to think about how it could affect your life.
So, What Is Health Literacy?
Personal health literacy is how well you can find and use information to make informed decisions about your health. For example, you could learn about nutrition so you can make informed decisions on what you eat. Or, you could learn about how mental health affects you. There are many aspects of health and our health impacts every part of our lives. By learning about health topics that apply to you, you are more capable of making a decision about your health.
Many people have limited health literacy. This is a problem because your health literacy level affects your actual health. Your health literacy is a stronger predictor of your health than your income, education level, or racial group1. Our health greatly affects our quality of life, so health literacy is crucial to our well-being.
How Can You Improve Your Health Literacy?
The first thing is to want to make informed decisions about your health. Then, to make informed decisions, try learning about health-related topics and issues that matter to you and those you care about. You can:
- Talk to your family doctor / general practitioner
- Do research on the internet (remember to fact check and look at multiple sources)
- Ask someone with knowledge in this field (ex. Physiotherapist, dietitian)
- Talk with family and friends. What history and traditions do they have with this area?
- See what works for you. When you were sick before, maybe you found that eating a certain food made you feel better. What works for one person might not work for you, so you can try out new things.
- Listen to podcasts or watch videos about health-related topics
Want to learn more about health literacy? Check out our resources page on it!
- Weiss Health literacy and patient safety: help patients understand. Manual for clinicians: Health literacy and patient safety: Help patients understand (hhvna.com)