Contextualizing Health Literacy to Health Care Organizations

Abstract

Parker, Ratzen and Lurie (2003) pointed out that a silent epidemic is affecting the health status of the American population, namely poor health literacy. Actually, inadequate health literacy is the main cause of the patients’ inability to navigate the health care environment, paving the way for inappropriateness in the provision of care as well as for poor health outcomes. Moreover, it has been esteemed that a third of the European population is not able to properly understand, process and use health information (HLS-EU Consortium, 2012). The same issue has been identified in several Asian countries (see, for example, Nakayama et al., 2015; Pednekar, Gupta & Gupta, 2011). What is striking is that—until today—the attention has been focused on the individual determinants of low health literacy, while studies concerning the organizational health literacy—that is to say, the ability of health care organization to establish friendly and comfortable relationships with the patients—are uncommon (Weaver, Wray, Zellin, Gautam & Jupka, 2012). This article is aimed at exploring the way health care organizations deal with patients living with inadequate health literacy. Drawing on the prevailing literature (Brach et al., 2012; DeWalt et al., 2013; Matthews & Sewell, 2002; Murphy-Knoll, 2007; Stableford & Mettger, 2007) the main approaches to improve organizational health literacy are examined. Then, a distinction between formal and informal tools to address organizational health literacy is suggested and the effectiveness of both of them is compared. The findings of the research suggest that informal tools are more common than formal tools, even though the former have lower perceived effectiveness as compared with the latter. Health care organizations seem to be still far from effectively activating comprehensive organizational health literacy pathways. There is a desperate need for systemic efforts to enhance the awareness of organizational health literacy and to encourage processes of change towards health literate organizational environments.

Organizational Health Literacy in Facilities for People with Disabilities: First Results of an Explorative Qualitative and Quantitative Study

“…Although the concept of individual HL is multidimensional [14,15], prior research has mainly focused on the concept of functional HL by Nutbeam and the concept of skills by Sørensen [16][17][18][19]. According to Nutbeam, functional HL consists of basic reading, literacy, and writing skills, and knowledge of health systems and conditions [14].…”

“…The main aim of OHL is to establish the promotion of HL in all structures and processes within organizations [18,23]. Improving OHL is likely to enable health care organizations to be adapted to the needs of patients [17], to strengthen patient satisfaction [24], to improve the quality of care [25], and to provide equal access to health care tailored to the capacities and competences of the general population [26].…”

“…Particularly in English-speaking countries, there are numerous guides available to strengthen OHL [23,25,29,32]. It seems that guides on organizational health promotion are mainly located in health care organizations (i.e., hospitals) [18,21,27]. In contrast to studies on OHL in hospitals [18,21,27], there is rare evidence on OHL of organizations other than hospitals or health care organizations (such as youth work [16] or maternal and child health [34]).…”

“…The majority of research on the implementation of OHL has focused on organizational measures promoting OHL, but insufficient consideration is given to organizational and partnership interventions [17,23,37]. Most interventions for the promotion of OHL are informally conducted in organizations and often emphasize the communication climate within (health care) organizations [18,32]. Regarding people with disabilities, the issue of health communication is particularly important.…”

Value Co-creation in the Health Service Ecosystems: The Enabling Role of Institutional Arrangements

“…For the sake of the argument, patients and health care professionals' associations -operating at the macro level -may assess the reliability of health-related information provided on the internet, thus offering a "roadmap" to collect, access and use health information to actors at the mega level (Dalmer, 2017). Health care organizations -which are located at the meso level -are able to foster the establishment of meaningful patient-provider relationships, thus setting the conditions for value co-creation during the medical encounter (Annarumma & Palumbo, 2016). Last but not least, heterogeneous factors such as history, culture, politics, law, health or pharmaceutical lobbies concern the mega level and affect the definition of national orientation towards health care (Frow et al, 2016).…”