BackgroundDefining health literacy from a public health perspective places greater emphasis on the knowledge and skills required to prevent disease and for promoting health in everyday life. Addressing health literacy at the community level provides great potential for improving health knowledge, skills and behaviours resulting in better health outcomes. Yet there is a notable absence of discussion in the literature of what a health literate population looks like, or how this is best assessed.DiscussionThe emphasis in assessing health literacy has predominantly focused on the functional health literacy of individuals in clinical settings. This review examines currently available health literacy assessment tools to identify how well suited they are in addressing health literacy beyond clinical care settings and beyond the individual. Although public health literature appears to place greater emphasis on conceptualizing critical health literacy, the focus continues to remain on assessing individuals, rather than on health literacy within the context of families, communities and population groups. When a population approach is adopted, an aggregate of individual health literacy assessment is generally used. Aggregation of individual health literacy fails to capture the dynamic and often synergistic relationships within communities, and fails to reflect societal influences on health knowledge, beliefs and behaviours.We hypothesise that a different assessment framework is required to adequately address the complexities of community health literacy. We assert that a public health approach, founded on health promotion theories provides a useful scaffold to assess the critical health literacy of population groups. It is proposed that inclusion of community members in the research process is a necessary requirement to coproduce such an appropriate assessment framework.SummaryWe contend that health literacy assessment and potential interventions need to shift to promoting the knowledge and skills essential for critical health literacy at a societal level. The challenge for researchers is to negotiate the myriad of complexities associated with each concept and component required for this task.

Objective:  This paper offers theories to explain persistent rural health challenges and describes their application to rural health and research.Methods:  Review of theories from several disciplines.Findings:  Key issues in rural health are poorer health status and access to health care, staff shortages, relationship‐based health provision and the role of health services in community sustainability. These could be fruitfully addressed by applying theory and findings around social determinants of health, economic sociology, the role of culture and capitals approaches to measuring assets. In particular, the concept of rural health might be a barrier to progressing knowledge; and relational approaches, common in geography, offer a more useful conceptual framework for studying health and place.Conclusions:  To move beyond its current stage, rural health needs to look to other disciplines' theories and ideas; particularly, it needs a more contemporary understanding of what place means so that health status and service provision can be improved by more thoughtful research.

In this article we aim to demonstrate how Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics may provide a sound methodological framework for researchers using the Delphi Technique (Delphi) in studies exploring health and well-being. Reporting of the use of Delphi in health and well-being research is increasing, but less attention has been given to covering its methodological underpinnings. In Delphi, a structured anonymous conversation between participants is facilitated, via an iterative survey process. Participants are specifically selected for their knowledge and experience with the topic of interest. The purpose of structuring conversation in this manner is to cultivate collective opinion and highlight areas of disagreement, using a process that minimizes the influence of group dynamics. The underlying premise is that the opinion of a collective is more useful than that of an individual. In designing our study into health literacy, Delphi aligned well with our research focus and would enable us to capture collective views. However, we were interested in the methodology that would inform our study. As researchers, we believe that methodology provides the framework and principles for a study and is integral to research integrity. In assessing the suitability of Delphi for our research purpose, we found little information about underpinning methodology. The absence of a universally recognized or consistent methodology associated with Delphi was highlighted through a scoping review we undertook to assist us in our methodological thinking. This led us to consider alternative methodologies, which might be congruent with the key principles of Delphi. We identified Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics as a methodology that could provide a supportive framework and principles. We suggest that this methodology may be useful in health and well-being studies utilizing the Delphi method.

The article examines the representation of housing risk in contemporary Australian policy discourse through a critical analysis of two policy texts from the recent Victorian Coalition government (2010–2014). Drawing on governmentality theory and contemporary debates on neoliberalism, it examines how these policy texts perpetuate a discourse in which ‘housing risk’ is primarily understood as an issue for individuals to manage, rather than as an issue with predominantly structural roots. It then explores how this particular neoliberal representation of ‘housing risk’ supports policy solutions that ultimately responsibilise individuals through a narrow focus on education and employment as the pathways to independence in the private housing market. The article argues that this situation is problematic in a context of increasing rates of homelessness and diminished access to affordable housing across Australia.

The therapeutic potential of nonpharmacologic interventions using biographical approaches at the end of life (EoL) is being increasingly recognized, but less attention is paid to processes impeding realization of this potential. In this article, Swedish and Australian researchers reflect on and problematize experiences using one biographical approach, dignity therapy (DT), in EoL care in Sweden. We use this as an example, focusing on critical examination of the process of applying DT in practice, examining frictions experienced in recruiting participants, collecting the data, and creating a biography. We discuss issues regarding agency, which became evident in the recruitment process and choices made about participation, and the power differentials manifested in the interactive process of eliciting stories and crafting them into a final product. We also raise salient questions about how research and practice with biographical approaches in EoL care might better build on and further existing knowledge to better reflect the complexities of everyday life.