Quality Standards for Diabetes Care Toolkit

Health literacy

Health literacy is an important element of structured education. A toolkit review written for the National Diabetes Service Improvement Committee describes health literacy as ‘the ability to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions’ (Kickbusch et al 2005 cited in Ministry of Health 2010, p iii). Health literacy includes how an individual navigates and interacts with our complex health system. It also includes people’s expectations about health and wellbeing, and their understanding of health messages, medicine labels and nutrition information, as well as their ability to fill out medical forms and talk with their doctor. Specifically related to diabetes, Boren (2009) states, ‘health literacy is vital to enable people to manage their health. There are many activities that people are responsible for when self-managing their diabetes that can be particularly challenging when limited health literacy is an issue. These activities include taking medication, eating a healthy diet, glucose monitoring, and reduction of risks. Persons with diabetes who have multiple complications or experience repeated hospitalizations might have some of these problems because of unrecognised low health literacy’ (p 203). The Boren (2009) article can be found here: www.jdst.org/January2009/articles/VOL-3-1-DIT1-BOREN.pdf.