Health Literacy Essay

Description Health literacy is defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions (Ratzan & Parker, 2000).” Health literacy has been more comprehensively defined by Sørensen et al. (2012) as an individual’s “knowledge, motivation and competences to access, understand, appraise and apply health information” in order to make informed health decisions, prevent diseases, and overall have a higher quality of life. Health literacy is a vital element in creating a safe environment for patients, as well as reducing costly medical errors.

Importance

Prior research has shown that physicians tend to overestimate patients’ health literacy. While, on the other hand, health care providers often find that due to embarrassment, patients are reluctant to reveal their health literacy deficits. Additionally, factors such as language and cultural barriers can further impact a patient’s level of health literacy. Immigrants moving to the mid-west may experience these challenges in health literacy, and as a result their health outcomes could be compromised. Most health literacy research has focused on health care providers. Conducting research on a minority risk group, with known lower health literacy barriers is important to understand all of the factors that lead to low health literacy

The SEM is used to help guide researches to identify the multiple factors that cause or influence an individual’s level of health literacy. The levels of the SEM are as follows: individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and society. There is no level of the SEM that is more important than another, and influential factor can overlap on different levels. Interventions that incorporate multiple levels of the SEM are the most effective in reducing a health