National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy….so much for build it and they will come.
“Eighty percent of American internet users, or some 113 million adults, have searched for information on at least one of seventeen health topics. Information professionals in a variety of settings are just as likely as librarians in hospital or medical centers to encounter requests for useful health information. Usefulness can be calculated as relevancy multiplied by accuracy, divided by the work necessary to obtain an answer. Despite the availability of accurate medical information, the work necessary to access and utilize such information often discourages both discovery and use.”
I lifted this quote from my own class description of the Medical Librarianship course I teach at San Jose State University. The statistic comes from Pew Internet and Society. My conclusion is that access to massive amounts of information does not guarantee a satisfactory user experience.
On May 27th, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release calling on a broad coalition heath information providers, policymakers, activists, and individuals to address a crisis in health literacy. Three key goals for the action plan include:
- Provide everyone with access to accurate and actionable health information
- Deliver person-centered health information and services
- Support lifelong learning and skills to promote good health
There is an open access issue built into the first focus point: “Provide everyone with access to accurate and actionable health information.” Certainly a member of the public can now walk into almost any academic health center library and sit down at a public workstation that offers access to all their electronic journal and book subscriptions. But what proportion of persons that really desire this level of access can actually overcome the hurdles of geography, transportation, and library hours, not to mention the literacy needed for searching, locating, and perhaps printing or downloading a copy for personal use?
As the balance of peer-reviewed literature shifts to electronic open access, we can eliminate many of the hurdles that involve traveling to a location or accessing relevant health information at a particular time. The public and congressional support for taxpayer access to funded research is certainly supporting the shift in this direction. We can imagine that as consumers access larger quantities of published health information, the other needs outlined for health literacy improvement become essential for understanding and changing negative behaviors.
Please take a look at the documents on the action plan web page.
Health literacy has universal relevance.
