Week 10: Health Literacy

An inadequate level of health literacy can lead to lower health outcomes and higher costs to the individual, community, State and Commonwealth.  The social determinants of health were associated with those most at risk.  Higher risk correlated to more frequent use of emergency and hospital services and lower levels of self-health care.

The World Health Organisation states that countries, communities and people who are empowered to make changes to health, literacy and lifestyle are less of a burden on their health systems  (Kanj & Mitic, 2009).  Strategies to improve literacy including reading through key points of provided literature, questioning for understanding, being culturally aware etc will assist those at risk to become more literate and better able to help themselves.

The interview with Peter was less relevant to health literacy than the next topic, disability.  He appeared to have a high level of literacy despite being affected by many of the social determinants.  He gave an example of hospital staff not listening/understanding his allergy to ventolin which caused an almost fatal outcome.  This made me think that people working within healthcare should be responsible for their own literacy and motivation to change as well as being able to teach it to others. Nurses must not assume that they know the patient better than the patient and take time to listen to what they say.

I felt that health literacy as one of the factors affecting health is lacking in many at risk groups and have personally seen this in the aged and health compromised.  Questions are not asked and treatment provided is not optimal because of this. 

I learnt that the strategies to assist health literacy, health and well-being can be provided but people must want to change and staff must have time and skills to deliver training.  The strategies used are similar to adult education principles and felt confident I could deliver except that spending enough time may not always be possible.

In my work, taking every opportunity I could to help the client understand and learn would assist to improve literacy levels.  Spending the time, using basic active listening and questioning techniques along with technology and medical resources would help me provide the best service I could to the patient and potentially reduce their time in hospital or motivate them to take action of their own when they got home.

Picture 6: Can you Read. Pharmacy Times (2016) 

References

Kanj, M., & Mitic, W. (2009). Health Literacy and Health Promotion. 7th Global Conference on Health Promotion, "Promoting Health and Development: Closing the Implementation Gap" (p. Track 1). Nairobi: World Health Organisation. found on http://www.who.int/healthpromotion/conferences/7gchp/Track1_Inner.pdf