Putting words into action: A simple focused education improves prescription label comprehension and functional health literacy

A narrative review on do’s and don’ts in prescription label writing – lessons for pharmacists

“…Tai et al 21 reported that age is a common significant predictor of prescription label comprehension and simple educational interventions such as one-on-one education provided on critical elements of the label could significantly improve the level of comprehension of prescription labels.…”

Establishing the efficacy of interventions to improve health literacy and health behaviours: a systematic review

“…The remaining four were quasi-experimental pre-post controlled trials [33,35,42,48]. Studies took place in nine countries -USA [30,31,37,39,40,42,43,45], Australia [35,51,52], Iran [32,34,47], China [41,44], Japan [36,49], Taiwan [48], Niger [38], Germany [50] and Demark [33].…”

“…Two studies focused on the domain of disease prevention (cancer screening [39] and malaria health literacy [38]), eight focused on healthcare (diabetes [30,37], gestational diabetes [32], breast cancer [36], cardiac conditions [33,34], one or more chronic conditions [35] and people taking two or more medications daily [31]). The remaining 12 studies focused on health promotion with eight focusing on general health promotion [41,42,44,45,48,[50][51][52], two focusing on nutrition [40,43], one on nutrition and physical activity [49] and one on smoking prevention [47].…”

“…Eight studies focused on specific ethnic groups or migrants from either Asia (Korea [37,39], China [38], Vietnam or Indonesia [48]), or Mexico [30,40,42,45]. All participants were adults and most studies covered the whole age spectrum however one study only included people aged 18-35 [32], two specified working age adults [38,39], and six focused on the later years in life with minimum age of 40 [40], 50 [35], 55 [31,52], 60 [44] and 65 [49] respectively.…”

“…There was considerable variation in how health literacy was defined and measured (see Table 2). Six studies [36,40,42,43,45,47] did not provide a definition, two [31,34] gave a definition but no clear reference to identify it, and the remaining 14 studies referenced 10 different definitions (three studies [30,35,48] gave multiple definitions) with Ratzan and Parker [54] used in five studies [30,35,37,39,51] and Sorensen [6] cited in four studies [33,[48][49][50].…”