Health Literacy Skills: The Key to Developing More Effective Health Communications

“If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

In the midst of enormous loss, trauma, fear, and confusion during the pandemic, we also lost our way in communicating with each other.

Regardless of our differences in backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, and attitudes, a crisis demands that we do better.

At all times, achieving health literacy requires meeting people where they are and engaging them as they are.

The resistance by some to follow recommendations from top scientists and medical experts should be a wake-up call for those of us in the health communications field to do our part to dramatically improve health literacy skills in the U.S.

What is Health Literacy?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines personal health literacy as “the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.”

The CDC defines organizational health literacy as the degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to accomplish this.

Recently, efforts have focused more on partnerships among all stakeholders to increase literacy skills.

This means that healthcare administrators, clinicians, frontline workers, and consumers collaborate to understand health information and improve health and well-being.

Anyone who is on a team that produces health communications is part of this effort.

Why is Health Literacy Important?

Health literacy is an important driver of good health, along with factors such as economic stability, a safe living environment, and educational opportunity. 

If we want to improve health and eliminate health disparities, we have to improve health literacy.

Why is Health Literacy Hard to Achieve?

In general, health literacy is hard to achieve because too often health communication conflicts with each other or is not medically reviewed or sourced. Consumers of health information do not know what to believe.

During the pandemic, public health messages were coming out quickly, but they were also changing rapidly as medical understanding evolved.

Everyone was affected and often in emotional ways. Many were trying to share information to be helpful, but didn’t have the facts or the expertise to understand the facts.

Tackling the Challenges of Health Literacy

The COVID-19 Health Literacy Project is one initiative addressing health literacy by creating accessible COVID-19 information and translating it into different languages.

The mission of this national coalition of medical students representing more than 35 institutions and 34 languages was to develop culturally sensitive and sound messaging at a reasonable level of health literacy for people around the world, in different languages.

Harvard Medical School faculty members reviewed and vetted these materials. Harvard Health Publishing collaborated with them to produce the final product. The team created the fact sheet below in English for a U.S. population on how to prevent the spread of COVID-19. 

Why is this Fact Sheet Effective?

This fact sheet appeals to the general public because it:

• Uses a combination of words, numbers, and visuals. It integrates universal pictures that any audience can understand.

• Offers a set of clear and definitive behavioral recommendations. Simple bold headlines help people know what is expected of them.

• Provides extra resource links from trusted sources if people want more information.

• Presents concepts simply. They are visually divided so that a person isn’t expected to read a long narrative.

• Keeps the writing at a sixth to eighth grade level.

Best Practices

Ideally, focus each communication product on no more than 3 things.

Avoid medical jargon and use simple explanations. For example:

Say “use” instead of “utilize.” Instead of saying “You have a double risk,” say “Average risk is 1 out of 1,000, but due to your family history, your risk is 2 out of 1,000”.

Use infographics. A picture is worth a thousand words! See the graphics used in the fact sheet above.

Translate complex information so that it is understood by end users. And test that understanding.

Communicate sensitively. Practitioners must explain information so that if people don’t understand words or statistics, they are not embarrassed to speak up and get clarification.

For example, a clinician might ask a patient to repeat the treatment protocol.

Test communication materials with various target populations. When you have all stakeholders involved in creating content and working together at all stages of development and dissemination, you still need to test your results.

The real test is when you conduct follow-up research to confirm that the desired health behavior change is happening!