Health Literacy

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.