The personal knowledge and competencies about health that accumulate through daily activities, social interactions and across generations. Health personal knowledge and competencies are mediated by the organizational structures and availability of resources that enable people to access, understand, appraise, and use information and services in ways that promote and maintain good health and well-being for themselves and those around them.
Health Promotion Glossary of Terms 2021 World Health Organization (WHO)
To go in depth
Health Literacy Overview
The Multi-Regional Clinical Trials-MRCT Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard (MRCT), with its great experience in this topic, explains how health literacy is a dynamic process and how it can be affected by various factors, like the stress of a new diagnosis or the setting within which information is being shared. MRCT is now proposing a new working definition of health literacy that reflects a consensus of health literacy as a two-sided construct affected by both:
- an individual’s capacities, and
- the abilities of those responsible for communicating information.
Adapted from MRCT Health Literacy in Clinical research. Health Literacy Overview
A new definition of health literacy
The definition of health literacy was updated in August 2020 with the release of the U.S. government’s Healthy People 2030 initiative. The update addresses personal health literacy and organizational health literacy and provides the following definitions:
- Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals can find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.
- Organizational 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 others.
These definitions are a change from the health literacy definition used in Healthy People 2010 and Healthy People 2020: “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.”
CDC-Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Health Literacy Basics
Santana S et al. Updating Health Literacy for Healthy People 2030: Defining Its Importance for a New Decade in Public Health. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 2021; 27(6): S258-S264
US Department of Human Services. National Action plan to improve Health Literacy
Video
Understand Health Literacy in Clinical Research
From MRCT, a helpful way for clinicians to learn about clear communications and plain language in clinical research.
Source: The MRCT Center Health Literacy in Clinical Research
Infographic
Ideas for improving Health literacy
From the Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation (CISCRP) a very useful infographic that provides guidance for improving one’s health literacy.
