Health Literacy: Implications for Child Health

Abstract

Health literacy is an important issue to consider in the provision of health-care to children. Similar to the adult population, most parents face health literacy challenges. Of particular concern, 1 in 4 parents have low health literacy, greatly affecting their ability to use health information to make health decisions for their child. High expectations are placed on parents and children to achieve effective disease management and positive health outcomes in the context of complex health-care systems and disease treatment regimens. Low health literacy affects parent acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, as well as child health outcomes across the domains of disease prevention, acute illness care, and chronic illness care. The effect of low health literacy is wide ranging, including 1) poor nutrition knowledge and behaviors, 2) higher obesity rates, 3) more medication errors, 4) more emergency department use, and 5) poor asthma knowledge, behaviors, and outcomes. Health-care providers can mitigate the effects of health literacy by seeking to align health-care demands with the health literacy skills of families. Effective health literacy–informed interventions provide insights into methods that can be used by providers and health systems to improve health outcomes. Health literacy–informed communication strategies should be used with all families in a “universal precautions approach” because all parents likely benefit from clear communication. As scientific advances are made in disease prevention and management, unless families understand how to follow provider recommendations, the benefit of these advances will not be realized and disparities in outcomes will be exacerbated.

Determinants of serum concentrations of perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) in school children and the contribution of low-level PFAA-contaminated drinking water

“…65 Parental education level is a socio-economic indicator that is associated with disease risks. 66,67 The sex-related differences in the multiple regression analyses were similar as in the crude analyses without covariate adjustment (Fig. 2, Table 2), showing that the determinants included in the present study did not markedly inuence sex differences in concentrations.…”

How Did Parents View the Impact of the Curriculum-Based HealthLit4Kids Program Beyond the Classroom?

“…Parent concerns about safety have been identified as a central and consistent barrier to physical activity participation of children [36]. Additional barriers to parent engagement in health promoting behaviours include perceived cost of health food and health activities, lack of time, and competing demands [37], parents being too busy to engage in healthy behaviours, concern held by providers that they may offend parents, and uncertainty on how to communicate the need to make changes to health choices at home [38]. Among the identified barriers, communication with parents about health promotion is a key difficulty, which is crucial to address given the importance of effective communication strategies with parents.…”

“…Among the identified barriers, communication with parents about health promotion is a key difficulty, which is crucial to address given the importance of effective communication strategies with parents. Morrison, Glick, and Yin [38] suggest that a "universal precautions approach" should be adopted because all parents will benefit from clear communication. Accordingly, such a universal approach with school-based health programs has the potential to mitigate low levels of health literacy by seeking to align the health literacy demands with the health literacy levels of the families that schools engage with weekly.…”

Development and Assessment of a Pictographic Pediatric Constipation Action Plan

“…Validated clinical tools have been developed to empower both providers and parents to care successfully for children with chronic diseases, including asthma, eczema and anaphylaxis action plans. Some of these tools have been shown to improve both clinical outcomes and HRQoL [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] .…”