Health literacy is a common thread through our programs.
We partner with bureaus and offices in our agency to train health professionals. We teach them to identify their patients' health literacy levels. This helps them change how they communicate.
Why it's important
It ensures people can:
- Find and use credible health information
- Make well-informed health-related decisions
Understanding what it is
Healthy People 2030 defines health literacy two ways:
- Personal: how well you can find, understand, and use information and services to make health-related decisions.
- Organizational: how well organizations enable people to find, understand, and use information and services.
What the research shows
Health literacy can:
- Make more people seek out preventive health care
- Improve health outcomes
- Decrease emergency room visits that people do not need
- Lower preventable stays in the hospital and readmissions
- Reduce the number of dosing errors
- Help patients better manage chronic conditions (like diabetes, high blood pressure, and HIV/AIDS)
- Improve quality of care
- Increase patient satisfaction
Ways to improve health literacy
Organizations can:
- Create user-friendly:
- Patient portals
- Telephone systems
- Forms
- Hire:
- Staff who speak two or more languages
- Interpreters for patients who don't speak English
- Pre-test with patients:
- Signs and directions you post to health care facilities
- Health information that patients can easily read and understand
- Forms and materials that are in languages other than English
- Provide clear directions for taking medication
Health care professionals can:
- Assume that every patient may not understand you
- Keep language free of jargon, speak slowly, and use short sentences
- Use materials that aid learning, such as videos, models, and pictures
- Apply the teach-back method. Ask patients to:
- Explain your instructions in their own words
- Show you how they'll take their medicine
- Ask open-ended questions that begin with "how" and "why"
- Listen to patients' stories without interrupting for a full minute
- Expect that patients will have questions and be ready to answer them
- Tell patients only what they need to know—emphasize and repeat the most important points
- Offer to help complete forms
Read our reports on health equity
- 2019-2020 Health Equity Report (PDF - 6 MB)
- 2017 Health Equity Report (PDF - 2 MB)
Review publications from our partners
- Health Literacy: A Necessary Element for Achieving Health Equity, National Academy of Medicine
- Ten Attributes of Health Literate Health Care Organizations, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Learn more about health literacy
- Telehealth Training and Workforce Development, HRSA
- Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
- Rural Health Literacy Toolkit, Rural Health Information Hub
- Roundtable on Health Literacy, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Explore other areas we focus on
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