LibGuides: Health Literacy: What is Health Literacy?

In this LibGuide, you will find...

What is health literacy?
What's new in health literacy literature?
How to make your organization health literate
Health literacy techniques
- Including universal precautions, teach back, asking open ended questions, risk communication, limiting information, and using plain language.
Health literacy resources
- Including statistics, medical dictionaries, research tools, reports, and toolkits.

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What is Health Literacy?

Who is affected by health literacy?

Everyone can struggle with health literacy, even those who are well educated. The ability to understand and use health information can be affected by emotional status, worry, sleep deprivation or unfamiliar topics. Use a universal approach to health literacy and communicate to everyone, every time, with health literacy principles in mind.

Why does health literacy matter?

Patients or families with low health literacy:

have longer and more frequent hospitalizations
use the ER to manage health more often
make more medication errors
have poorer health outcomes
face increasing health care costs

All patients and families need health information that is clear and helps them understand what they need to know and do.

“Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.”

(Healthy People)

“...the constellation of skills, including the ability to perform basic reading and numerical tasks required to function in the health care environment,” including “the ability to read and comprehend prescription bottles, appointment slips, and other essential health-related materials.”

(The American Medical Association's Ad Hoc Committee on Health Literacy)

"These definitions present health literacy as a set of individual capacities that allow the person to acquire and use new information."

(Baker, D [2006] The Meaning and the Measure of Health Literacy. J Gen Intern Med 21(8): 878–883. doi: 10.1111/j.1525-1497.2006.00540.x)

New PubMed Health Literacy Articles

See our Guide on Literature Searching

This feed updates automatically as new articles are available in PubMed. Click the "Info icon" to read the article abstract.

The MEDLINE/PubMed health literacy search retrieves citations to English language journal literature. The results shown are sorted by most recent. The Reference and Web Services Section of the National Library of Medicine created and maintains this health literacy search strategy. If you would like to see the full results of this search, you can click here.