Health Literacy Month
Date: 11/04/24
MHS providers and staff work together to improve the member/patient experience. We share many of the same challenges and goals. We are united in the desire to provide our members – many of your patients – with the ability to live long, healthy lives.
October was Health Literacy Month. It’s a month dedicated to the work we do together to provide context, education, and focus to the robust landscape of healthcare and the degree to which a patient is able to interpret their overall experience through health literacy.
The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion’s Healthy People 2030 initiative defines personal health literacy as, “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, communicate, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.”
According to the NIH National Library of Medicine, An Introduction to Health Literacy, people with low health literacy skills are more likely to:
Have poor health outcomes, including hospital stays and emergency room visits.
Make medication errors.
Have trouble managing chronic diseases.
Skip preventive services.
What can we do?
Understand what health literacy is and be able to define it.
Start by assuming most people don’t understand. Don’t assume a patient’s level of understanding by looking at them.
Use plain language when communicating health-related information.
Help patients get to a level of understanding by being proactive in checking for successful communication and resetting expectations.
Develop a cultural sensitivity perspective.
Make a concerted effort to extract and retain knowledge of patients’ culture and language needs and preferences.
Understand the tools available to assist patients/members.
Health literacy is empowerment. According to the World Health Organization, “health literacy is critical to both empowering people to make decisions about personal health, and in enabling their engagement in collective health promotion action to address the determinants of health.”
There are also social benefits to higher health literacy rates. The World Health Organization suggests that empowered and educated populations are enabled to:
Play an active role in improving their own health,
Engage successfully with community action for health, and
Hold governments accountable for addressing health and health equity.
At MHS, we recognize that achieving Health Literacy is not accomplished without effort. We are grateful to be working together with you to make improvements, share information, and develop clear and attainable measures toward this common goal.
Our members and your patients each deserve an empowering future in their health care journey. Thank you for your partnership and all the work you do to support MHS members in their journey toward better healthcare.