Health Literacy Meaning Nursing

The responsibility of patient education is mostly shouldered by nurses and yet nursing is the discipline that is most lacking in knowledge and awareness about health literacy.

Health literacy meaning nursing. Nurses were least comfortable identifying low literacy patients and assessing a patient s health literacy level. Health literacy is the ability to obtain read understand and use healthcare information in order to make appropriate health decisions and follow instructions for treatment. Studies concerning health literacy in all settings were included.

Some also view health knowledgeas part of health literacy. A systematic review with qualitative syntheses was performed crd42017065149. The ability to learn retain and apply health information is greatly affected by health literacy and thus greatly affects patient outcomes.

Studies before 15 march 2017 were identified from pubmed medline embase web of science scopus psycarticles and the cochrane library. The official definition of health literacy is an individual s ability to obtain communicate process and understand basic health information and services according to the centers for disease control and prevention cdc. More experienced nurses reported more difficulty with low literacy populations than less experienced nurses.

Health literacy is linked to literacy and entails people s knowledge motivation and competences to access understand appraise and apply health information in order to make judgements and take decisions in everyday life concerning health care disease prevention and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life during the life course. This is also the definition that was included in healthy people 2010 and 2020. The objective of this review was to clarify what health literacy represents.

Providing health literacy support to patients should be a core nursing skill. The aim of this paper is to map the possibilities of applying this concept in contemporary nursing and to reveal the conditions for and against its use in the nursing profession. 1 just like reading literacy gives you skills to understand and use written information health literacy refers to.

The patient protection and affordable care act of 2010 title v defines health literacy as 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.