What is Health Literacy?
Health literacy is about how people understand health information and how they use it to make choices about their health.
There are two parts to health literacy:
- Individual health literacy – how a person’s skills help them understand health information and make health choices
- The health literacy environment – the physical space, people, policies, systems and more, and how this affects a person’s access to health services and information
Why is it important?
Almost 60% of Australians have low health literacy.
People with low health literacy are:
- up to three times more likely to have poor health
- more likely to need to go to the hospital
- less likely to take part in prevention activities like cancer screening and vaccinations
- more likely to die earlier
If we improve health literacy, we will:
- improve people’s health and quality of life
- help people to take care of their own health
- reduce costs to the health system and for the people who use it
What is our role?
As a PHN we are working with primary care providers and the community to:
- encourage health information that is easy to understand
- ensure the services we fund build the health literacy of the community
- develop the skills of primary care providers in our region to improve communication with their patients
- include health literacy strategies within our core activities
Our Health Literacy Framework sets a clear, long-term approach to ensure people in our region can access, understand and use health information to make informed decisions about their care. It is built on three integrated domains:
- Providing accessible and responsive health information
- Embedding health literacy into systems and services
- Building capability through education and training
By working together, the Framework helps create health-literate environments and helps us to achieve fair access for everyone.
Tips for Community
- Take notes – bring a pen and paper to your health appointment and write things down to help you remember what your doctor says.
- Ask and repeat – ask questions and then repeat the information back to your doctor to help you check that you understand your health problem, the treatment, and what you need to do next.
- Bring a friend – bringing a friend or family member to your appointment who can also listen and ask questions can help you to understand and remember what your doctor says.
- Use Symptom Checker — The healthdirect Symptom Checker can help you work out what might be wrong, learn what to do next, and give you simple information you can share with your doctor.
Resources for Primary Care Providers
- Consider using plain language that avoids jargons and acronyms. The Plain Language Thesaurus helps with this by assessing the comprehension and health literacy level of your documents or resources and suggesting changes where appropriate
- Using communication aids such as pictures or demonstrating with models can complement health information
- The TeachBack method helps to check for understanding by asking a patient to repeat back what they heard in their own words. Free training is also available via the TeachBack website
- Some people might benefit from using an interpreter. National Translator and Interpreter Services are free to use. It’s important to ensure to adjust communication when using an interpreter
- Adopt a Universal Precautions Approach which assumes most people will not understand the information and advice provided to them
- Make sure health information handouts are easy to understand. To check, primary care providers can ask for feedback from the patient on whether the information is clear and/or use a readability checker to review the text. We recommend the Health Literacy Editor
