Title : Hospital health literacy: An overlooked yet desperately needed scientific and practice dimension of health literacy
Abstract:
The importance of health literacy and its relationship to disease prevention and management, treatment compliance, medication errors, health outcomes, hospital admission rates, and mortality has been firmly established in the scientific literature. General Health literacy, disease specific health literacy and their associated sub categories have been conceptually and operationally defined, studied, and translated into practice for decades. More recently, in response to the growing complexity of health systems and influence of technologies on health, the health literacy dimensions of health system navigation and digital health has emerged and progressed in scope. Patients and their loved ones face numerous challenges during a hospitalization episode including, maintaining autonomy during hospitalization, medical decision making, understanding and navigating care team roles and responsibilities, unit safety protocol adherence, medication safety, post discharge service use and medication adherence, patient experience and satisfaction, and health outcomes among others. While these patient and family challenges remain numerous and their adverse impact on patients understood in clinical practice and documented in the literature, the concept of hospital health literacy (HHL) has only recently entered the scientific literature and therefore lacks the breadth and depth of research needed to establish it as an indispensable dimension of health literacy. Hospital health literacy (HHL) is a potentially important intervention that may restore the hospitalized patient autonomy, self-advocacy, and experience and satisfaction in the ever increasing complex hospital setting and needs to be studied. Based on the hypothesized challenges affecting patients with low or inadequate HHL, additional research is needed to test the presence and nature of these relationships and explore opportunities to improve hospitalization quality and health outcomes.
