Many Americans Have Poor Health Literacy
Posted on March 2, 2011 by kcarlson | No Comments
By Sandra G. Boodman for Kaiser Health News in the Washington Post
Monday, February 28, 2011; 8:37 PM
An elderly woman sent home from the hospital develops a life-threatening infection because she doesn’t understand the warning signs listed in the discharge instructions.
A man flummoxed by an intake form in a doctor’s office reflexively writes “no” to every question because he doesn’t understand what is being asked.
A young mother pours a drug that is supposed to be taken by mouth into her baby’s ear, perforating the eardrum. And a man in his 70s preparing for his first colonoscopy uses a suppository as directed, but without first removing it from the foil packet.
Each of these examples provided by health-care workers or patient advocates illustrates one of the most pervasive and under-recognized problems in medicine: Americans’ alarmingly low levels of health literacy – the ability to obtain, understand and use health information.
A 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that 36 percent of adults have only basic or below-basic skills for dealing with health material. This means that 90 million Americans can understand discharge instructions written only at a fifth-grade level or lower. About 52 percent had intermediate skills: They could figure out what time a medication should be taken if the label says “take two hours after eating,” while the remaining 12 percent were deemed proficient because they could search a complex document and find the information necessary to define a medical term.
Regardless of their literacy skills, patients are expected to manage multiple chronic diseases, to comply with drug regimens that have grown increasingly complicated and to operate sophisticated medical devices such as at-home chemotherapy equipment largely on their own.
Health literacy “affects every single thing we do,” said Susan Pisano, a member of the Institute of Medicine’s health literacy round-table and vice president of communications for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade association. “The implications are mind-boggling.”
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