Beyond the bench and bedside: Health literacy is fundamental to sustainable health and development

Abstract

Thirty years after the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development -predicated on seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) -were unveiled to the global community. Health literacy is an essential precondition and indicator of achieving the SDGs. Efforts to define and describe health literacy within public health and medicine have identified that the skills and abilities of many populations are inadequate to navigate the demands and complexity of health and healthcare. The authors suggest health literacy must move beyond the bench and bedside in clinical practice to achieve the aspirations and objectives of the SDGs. This report synthesizes major developments in health literacy and draws from related disciplines to propose opportunities and future directions to improve health literacy across the lifespan. It introduces the cases of early childhood vaccinations; alcohol intake in adolescence; and dementia care in older adults to demonstrate the need for health literacy across the life course. It also draws on digital health data and technology and multisectoral partnerships to define the future of health literacy. The authors believe these approaches can and will lead to unlikely collaborations that advance health and well-being throughout and beyond the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Cardiovascular health care and health literacy among immigrants in Europe: a review of challenges and opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Information about the virus and non-pharmacologic intervention measures should be available in the migrants’ native language, partly as an important countermeasure against fake news spreading via social media (Islam et al 2020 ). Increasing the health literacy in newly arrived migrants could increase the acceptance of non-pharmacologic intervention, help to detect and isolate infected individuals and protect the vulnerable (Christie and Ratzan 2020 ).…”

IC-Health Project: Development of MOOCs to Promote Digital Health Literacy: First Results and Future Challenges

“…Evidence indicates that these people use criteria far beyond those recommended in the guidelines to assess the quality of the websites [11]. Accordingly, it is crucial to promote the development of competencies that allow them to evaluate health information with criteria on the quality and veracity of that information and to manage that information effectively and to be able to make informed decisions about their health, allowing an optimization in the provision of health services that not only has benefits at the individual level but also allows progress in solving inequalities in access to health information, as mentioned in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development [15,34].…”

“…These courses have been developed in eight different languages for different population cohorts. The population cohort approach was in line with the idea of offering resources to improve DHL and favor life-long learning, highlighted as an objective within the 2030 agenda for sustainable development [15].…”

“…Therefore, the improvement of the DHL is considered to be linked to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, since most of the difficulties involve citizens being able to effectively use health information, especially that offered on the Internet, which also makes the improvement of such skills a priority issue from a sustainability perspective [15].…”

“…3. Health and the Internet: in this case, the 8 items of the eHeaLS scale [23] were used (questions [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. This scale was complemented by additional ad hoc questions aimed at investigating the participants' frequency, motivations, feelings and habits in using the Internet for health-related purposes.…”