October is Health Literacy Month, and it’s a great time to reemphasize the importance of health literacy, personally and professionally in the workplace.
According to Healthy People 2030, organizational health literacy is the degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and other people.
Organizational health literacy includes skills that clinics, health care providers, hospitals, insurance companies, and others in healthcare can use to communicate with their patients.
The Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services Health Literacy Toolbox provides health literacy basics, major reports, health literacy tools for older adults, plain language tips, tools for providers, tools for patients and families, measuring document readability and usability, and a literacy skills assessment to test your health literacy.
Providers
Health literacy can play a big part in improving healthcare outcomes across the United States.
Providers can improve their communication outcomes with patients by:
- Using the teach-back method to check understanding of key points before patients exit the office
- Simplifying the language used in written materials to a sixth-grade reading level
- Having staff on hand to assist patients with intake forms
- Following up with patients a day or two after hospital discharge to make sure they understand how to manage their at-home care
- Performing “brown bag” medication reviews to clarify how to take medications appropriately, and to eliminate outdated or duplicate prescriptions
- Providing interpreters and translated materials for people with limited English proficiency (LEP) and patients with hearing/vision disabilities in their preferred format
- Redesigning prescription labels to make dosage instructions simpler, easier to see and read
- Reevaluating signs and maps to make sure that first-time visitors can easily locate their destinations
- Ensuring that no one is asked to sign a consent form without understanding its contents
Clinicians are often surprised that literacy is one of the strongest predicators of health status.
Patients
55.9 percent of our patients have Medicare and 11.5 percent of our patients have Medicaid. This means that 67.4 percent of our patients are vulnerable to health literacy issues. Literacy is a stronger prediction of an individual’s health status than income, employment status, education level, and racial or ethnic group.
Patients with low health literacy are more likely to visit the emergency room, have more hospital stays, are less likely to follow treatment plans, and have higher mortality rates.
Personal health care literacy skills include skills that people can use to manage their health, including reading and writing skills, math skills, basic understanding of psychology and science, ability to understand and interpret charts and graphs, and ability to navigate an increasingly complex medical and insurance system, according to Healthy People 2030.
Personal health literacy is the degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and other people.
According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, around 40 percent of American adults lack the necessary skills to make informed decisions about their own health.
Health illiteracy can disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities, people with lower socio-economic status and education attainment, non-native English speakers and the elderly.
A lack of health literacy can be prevalent regardless of education level. People are often hesitant to admit things they do not know, so doctors remain unaware of how much of their communication has been misunderstood. A simple misunderstanding can be a significant cause of so-called “non-patience.” This is where health communication can help bridge a gap and improve health care outcomes.
Health literacy isn’t just a literacy problem, but a communication problem as well. There are communication mismatches between people and their health providers and there needs to be efforts made to bridge the gap.
For more information and to learn how we can help your organization improve its health literacy, contact an expert today!
Resources
Four Ways to Improve Health Literacy at Your Health Care Organization – CMS QIN-QIO
National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) – Health Literacy