Question

How does poor health literacy impact the health care system?

Answer 1

Health literacy is “the degree to which an individual has the capacity to obtain, communicate, process and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions. Individual may have a poor health literacy skill due to learning disabilities, lack of health education, cognitive decline in elderly individuals. Patient and healthcare professionals need health literacy skills to communicate and make decisions about treatment and intervention plans to perform proper care in healthcare system.

Poor health literacy of patient or healthcare members may lead to

• Find difficulties to locate services in a health fascility and find informations about the treatment.
• Difficulty in communicating  with healthcare professionals. When patients receive written health communication materials that don’t match their reading level, patient education is not.
• To determine the appropriate decision or action on some specific conditions in several situations.
• Feel difficulty in understanding the purpose and outcome of treatments.
• Health literacy challenges may impact older adults more than other age groups.
• Potential communication barriers between patients and health care providers created by low health literacy may lead to a variety of negative health outcomes for the patient. For example, such communication barriers have been associated with patients being more likely to be hospitalized.
• Patients with low health literacy also tend to use the emergency department more often and are more likely to return to the emergency department for the follow up.
• Decide which information is relevant for a patient in some situations
• Healthcare providers may feel difficult to assist individual in finding information and services, and understand what individual is searching for.

Risk associated with poor health literacy in healthcare systems are

• Poor disease outcome due to ineffective treatment and follow up.
• Hospitalization because of inadequate knowledge.  
• Incorrectly talking medicine regardless of prescription.
• Death due to ignorance and deficient knowledge regarding health condition.
• Making poor decision about treatment.
• Higher utilization of expensive healthcare service and greater healthcare spending.
• Poor health literacy associated with a poor likelyhood of obtaining preventive care, understanding medical label, physicians instructions etc.

Poor health literacy negatively impact the healthcare system in every aspects. Total quality of patient care may decrease. It also affect in the total cost of treatment and outcome. So health literacy and effective treatment with proper health education of the patient required to achieve a positive outcome.