Libraries and Health Literacy Campaigns as Veritable Tools for Curtailment of COVID- 19 in Nigeria

Mathew Adesanmi Farukuoye ,Sunday Olurotimi Obadare

doi:10.7176/jep/11-17-08

Abstract

Health literacy is an important aspect of preventive measures in curtailing the spread of diseases in the society. This is due to the fact that a health literate person understands his/her health status, take prevention and control measures of various diseases. The purpose of this paper was to discuss how libraries and deployment of health literacy campaigns can prevent, control and curtail the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Nigeria. The researchers reviewed several literatures and found out that libraries have a big role to play to ensure that community recognises their information needs, search for relevant information and make use of the information to make informed health decisions. The study concluded that COVID-19 imposes a double burden of health emergency and economic crisis on government and the people. Therefore, it becomes imperative for all stakeholders including the libraries to be deeply involved in health literacy campaigns in order to curtail the spread of the pandemic code named COVID-19 in Nigeria. Keywords: Health Literacy, Libraries, COVID-19, Nigeria DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-17-08 Publication date: June 30th 2020

Highlights

The World Health Organisation defines health literacy as cognitive and social skills determining individuals’ motivation and ability to receive, understand, and use information in a health-promoting manner
The literature searching was conducted after three major steps; (i) Search formulation where the topic was analyzed to give key concepts (Health literacy, Libraries, Diseases, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Nigeria), (ii) Choosing the appropriate information sources, and (iii) Use the identified keywords in step (i) to conduct search in the LibHub, Google scholar and World Health Organisation (WHO) databases
Libraries as strong partners in promoting health literacy in the prevention and spread of COVID-19 The role of library in promoting health literacy can not be overemphasized as libraries have been noted to support community development in various areas such as education, economic, research and health

Summary

Introduction

The World Health Organisation defines health literacy as cognitive and social skills determining individuals’ motivation and ability to receive, understand, and use information in a health-promoting manner. Since people need to stay safe and healthy amidst the crisis of COVID-19 that is looming danger all over the world, health literacy becomes an important thing to everyone. This is mainly because in many cases health literacy is related to the health status of patients and community at large (Tang et al, 2008; and Sanders et al, 2009). Health literacy is linked to economic development such that people with low health literacy do not have the ability to engage effectively in socio economic activities due to poor health status (Mnzava and Katabalwa, 2017)

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