Health literacy month runs from 1st-31st October 2024. During the month, you will see lots of resources being shared by the Evidence team to help you:-
- Understand what health literacy is and why it is important
- What this means for your patients and clients
- How you can get involved
The themes for the month are:
- What is health literacy
- Communicating with patients and simplifying information
- Highlighting NHSL health literacy services and resources you can use in your everyday practice
- Realistic medicine/shared decision making
What is health literacy and why is it important?
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”. 20% of people in the UK and Ireland are classified as having the lowest level of adult literacy. It has also been suggested that 50% of what a patient hears in a consultation is forgotten and of the information that is remembered, 50% is misunderstood.
What this may means for your patients/clients?
The average reading age in Scotland is around age 9-11 with 1 in 28 people facing serious challenges with literacy. Add in the stress of a hospital, clinic or medical appointment and literacy can drop even further….even further still is there are numbers involved in the instructions/advice being given.
Those with lower health literacy have:-
- Poorer health
- Poorer medicines management
- Higher chance of hospitalisation
- Higher mortality
For NHS Lanarkshire this means:-
- Higher healthcare costs
- Poorer Care
- Repeated appointments
- Sicker patients
How can you get involved?
- Make sure you click on the health literacy toolkit at this link to access resources and further information.
- Re-tweet the health literacy month tweets and make sure we spread the message widely.
You can also ask the evidence team to help you with simple changes such as reviewing your patient communications, your patient leaflets and signage to make sure these are designed with health literacy principles in mind.
For further information, contact amanda.minns@lanarkshire.scot.nhs.uk
