What is Health Literacy? How to measure it? Why is it important?

Health literacy, when the doctor gives a medical information to a patient, it is the ability of the patient to understand, interprete the medical information and act appropriately according to this ability. Patients confront with complicated informations and treatments. Limited health literacy effects diagnosis and treatments in negative way and causes unnecessarily hospitalizations and emergency service usage, unnecessary diagnostic tests, increased hospitalizations. Initially, health literacy seems like a nonphysical concept but then lots of scales have been improved for its measurement. Institute of Medicine published “Health Literacy: Prescription to End Confusion” and assessed all scales of health literacy and divided into four main groups: These are TOFHLA (Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults), REALM (Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine), HALS (Health Activities Literacy Scale), NVS (Newest Vital Sign). It is important to improve health literacy of people for health promotion. With the educataion of health workers, barriers for limited health literacy can be defined and some interventions can be done to improve health literacy levels of community.