Monday, March 10, 2014
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Health Literacy
Source: Ratzan,S.C. (2001) Health literacy: communication for the public good. Health Promotion International. 16; 2001; 207–214.
The
term ‘health literacy’ was
first used by SK Simonds in
a 1974 paper entitled ‘Health Education as Social Policy’
(Ratzan).
However, the concept gained much importance in the year 1998 when
the American Medical Association
(AMA) recognized that limited patient literacy affects medical
diagnosis and treatment. The AMA laid down foundation to raise
awareness of health literacy within the health care community.
By
the year 2000,
the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services,
identified that improving the
health literacy
skills of the
nation is a
key public health priority.
They defined
health literacy 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’ (Healthy
People 2010)
Source: Ratzan,S.C. (2001) Health literacy: communication for the public good. Health Promotion International. 16; 2001; 207–214.
Health Literacy is more on the communication and services aspect between a doctor and a patient where librarians are indirectly involved in strengthening health literacy skills.
Health Information Literacy -
Similar to information literacy, health information literacy is defined as-
The U.S Medical Library Association (MLA) gave a working definition of
health information literacy (HIL)
as “the set of abilities needed to recognize
a health information need; identify
likely information sources and use them to retrieve relevant
information; assess the quality of the information and its
applicability to a specific
situation; and analyze, understand, and use the information to make
good health decisions”.
Here librarians involvement is seen as direct: (Librarians- Doctors) OR (Librarians-Public)
We guide various communities towards the use of authentic resources and many more aspects of information literacy.
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