Abstract
The term organizational health literacy (OHL) is a new concept that emerged to address the challenge of predominantly in patients with limited health literacy (HL). There is no consensus on how OHL can improve HL activities and health outcomes in healthcare organizations. In this study, a systematic review of the literature was conducted to understand the evidence for the effectiveness of OHL and its health outcome, and the facilitators and barriers that influence the implementation of OHL. A literature search was done using six databases, the gray literature method and reference hand searches. Thirteen potentially articles with data on 1254 health organizations were included. Eight self-assessment tools and ten OHL attributes have been identified. Eleven quality-improvement characteristics and 15 key barriers were reviewed. Evidence on the effectiveness of HL tools provides best practices and recommendations to enhance OHL capacities. Results indicated that shifting to a comprehensive OHL would likely be a complex process because HL is not usually integrated into the healthcare organization’s vision and strategic planning. Further development of OHL requires radical, simultaneous, and multiple changes. Thus, there is a need for the healthcare system to consider HL as an organizational priority, that is, be responsive.
Highlights
In the late modern “health” and “multi-option” communities, health literacy is a specific skill that is needed to successfully deal with a large number of health relevant-tasks and decisions to be taken every day [1,2].The concept of health literacy (HL) is used in the United States to study the effectiveness of HL on treatment outcome, especially in patients with insufficient and inadequate HL severity [2,3]
This review provides insights into the implementation of organizational health literacy (OHL) that are less visible to health providers and patients, and identify facilitators and barriers that influence the quality of the organization and delivery of healthcare systems
We collected all data from 7 different countries, and 57% of studies were undertaken in the United States of America (USA) [34,35,36,37]
Summary
The concept of health literacy (HL) is used in the United States (mainly in medical centers) to study the effectiveness of HL on treatment outcome, especially in patients with insufficient and inadequate HL severity [2,3]. In this framework, there is evidence that HL must be regarded as a context or relationship strategy related to personal HL, but the needs of the organization for users must be considered [4,5]. Public Health 2020, 17, 7544; doi:10.3390/ijerph17207544 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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