International Volunteer Day – December 5 :: Improve Health Literacy in Poor Communities: Start a literacy program

Teaching Adults

a literacy resource book

Terrie Lipke

New Readers Press 2013

International Volunteer Day – December 5

Improve Health Literacy in Poor Communities: Start a literacy program

Beginning Guides: 11.13.2015

Health Literacy: An economic issue

In the US, literacy has long been addressed as an economic issue, a pre-requisite for a productive workforce in a competitive global economy.  Some scholars argue that political campaigns to address adult low literacy have been undertaken repeatedly in the US and elsewhere to explain or distract from economic downturns, most recently in 1991 by  GH Bush.[1], That campaign produced the the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey. Results led academic medical researchers to discover a glacier in their backyard — the fact that few Americans understand information from doctors or insurers.  The first health literacy studies in the medical literature came out in 1993.

Workers' low literacy as an explanation for national economic woes extended to patients' low literacy as an explanation for low quality, high costs and inequities in healthcare.  Health literacy was understood as low functional literacy (reading and numeracy) in a clinical setting. The thinking went like this: if patients could read better, they would better understand their disease and treatment instructions, and so comply. Outcomes would improve and we would avoid unnecessary expenses like ED visits, re-testing and re-admissions. That thinking led to much needed information-improvement initiatives.  READ MORE !