Health Literacy in Context.

Don Nutbeam,Gill Rowlands,Diane Levin-Zamir

doi:10.3390/ijerph15122657

Abstract

Health literacy has been defined and conceptualized in multiple ways, but almost all definitions have similar core elements describing the personal skills that enable individuals to obtain, understand, and use information to make decisions and take actions that will have an impact on their health. [...].

Highlights

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) was conceived with the aim of examining current progress in understanding health literacy in context, looking to attract papers that improve our understanding of the mutual impact of a range of social, economic, environmental, and organisational influences on health literacy
We were especially interested in attracting submissions that reported on the relationships between physical and social environments and health literacy; interventions to reduce environmental demands and complexity, including, for example, interventions to reduce the organisational and administrative complexity of health services; health literacy interventions responsive to cultural preferences; and health literacy interventions that use the preferred media of disengaged populations
Through the call for abstracts, we received a large number and wide range of potential submissions. This response is indicative of the high level of current interest in health literacy from a very wide range of country, sectoral, and cultural perspectives

Summary

Introduction

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) was conceived with the aim of examining current progress in understanding health literacy in context, looking to attract papers that improve our understanding of the mutual impact of a range of social, economic, environmental, and organisational influences on health literacy. We were especially interested in attracting submissions that reported on the relationships between physical and social environments and health literacy; interventions to reduce environmental demands and complexity, including, for example, interventions to reduce the organisational and administrative complexity of health services; health literacy interventions responsive to cultural preferences; and health literacy interventions that use the preferred media of disengaged populations.

Results

Conclusion