Health literacy is not just reading and writing

摘要

What does the term "health literacy" conjure up in your mind? Literacy, no doubt, suggests the ability to read and write. Add health, and it seems straightforward: the ability to read and write in a health context. The concept of health literacy certainly includes an individual's capacity to access, understand and use written health information but, over the past 20 years, it has widened into something much more interesting and relevant to pharmacy practice. The academic discussion seems to have produced two watersheds, depicted in Panel 1 (p334). Before 2000, the research into health literacy concentrated on functional aspects - the reading and writing skills of people who had long-term health problems (and who were usually in hospital). In the US, there was a burst of development of tools for testing health literacy, the two most well-known being Rapid estimate of adult literacy in medicine (REALM) and Test of functional health literacy in adults (TOFHLA; see Panel 2, p334).