Concept Analysis - Health Literacy - Essay Example

Health literacy Concept Analysis The concept selected for analytical study in this paper is Health Literacy (HL). Clinical outcome variable of healthliteracy is theoretically defined as the ability to perform basic reading and numerical tasks in the health care environment. The topic deals with the suggestion on the importance of the talent to read write and calculate in flourishing healthcare outcome. Health literacy is the skill to comprehend knowledge about health and to utilize those acquaintances to build superior resolutions concerning your physical condition and therapeutic concern. Health information can engulf even populace with superior literacy expertise. Approximately one third of the grown-up populace in the United States has restricted health literacy. The importance of Health Literacy is seen in recent days witnessing spreading diseases due to unawareness. The foundation for the selected topic is the prevailing global scenario. Many health problems have recently captured numerous lives and health with their dreadful hands across the world in many forms. Diseases like anthrax, swine flu etc have created great hue and cry universally, and studies have proved the reasons for it as inappropriate health literacy. This can influence the capability to block out multifaceted outline which takes away the ability to point out reasons and suppliers. The different services available can be identified only through health literacy. Health literacy will help contribute to health experience and private incidents leading to betterment in health sector. Personal health needs to handle persistent ailments. The consumption of medicines to cure various diseases can be done properly only through the edification on health information. Inhabitants with sufficient health literacy have improved health condition compared to folks with restricted health literacy proficiency. Populace with imperfect Health Literacy has a reduced amount of information regarding the significance of precautionary health procedures; always fail to handle different continual illness by self supervision. They may be unsuccessful in taking proper medication from appropriate facilities and at times even fail to follow remedial instructions given. Partial health literacy has been revealed to be connected with reduced health in a variety of surroundings and circumstances, and is predominantly common among the aged groups, people with least educational backgrounds, populace belonging to reduced socioeconomic conditions, and groups under the disturbance of various persistent illnesses. Identifying limited HL in common practice is vital as there is proof to recommend that couture contact to those with underprivileged HL can get better results in chronic ailments. As health inflates, the responsibility of a person in the health culture turns out to be very much important and diverse and health literacy achieves growing significance. Health literacy is the skill to formulate better health resolution in the background of daily existence - at dwelling, in the society, at the place of work, the health supervisory scheme, the bazaar lay and the opinionated field. It is a decisive authorizing strategy to augment popular power above their health, their aptitude to search for knowledge on health and their skill to take duty. To boost health literacy must be a fundamental constituent of any contemporary health and communal plan. Health literacy is defined in Health People 2010 as: "The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions” (Glassman). Health literacy is an important activity where people are given the knowledge of essential healthcare information and the services they need to take to formulate suitable fitness decision. The uses of the concept of health literacy are innumerable. Health literacy leads to improved health knowledge regarding the basic understanding of human body. Health literacy is a new concept which authorizes public to take steps correctly in newest and varying health-related conditions all the way through the utilization of superior thinking and use of public skills. The main use of health literacy is in removing the ignorance and misunderstandings related to certain diseases like Cancer, Aids etc. Health literacy empowers the people to make right health care decisions. Health literacy provides right information on nutrition, puberty and reproduction and the appropriate hygiene and sanitation measures to people. Health literacy leads people to take preventive and curative measures for diseases and thereby a reduction in health cares expenses. Health literacy reduces the frequency of visits to hospitals Health literacy makes nursing job easier and more accurate. Women’s health literacy brings changes in women’s lives, and makes them to seek independently information relating to healthcare in case of diseases like breast cancer. Health literacy leads to early treatment of complicated diseases like cancer. Previously the concept of health literacy was narrow, the concept was used to explain the relation between a person’s ability to read and understand the prescribed medication and equated health literacy only to reading of medicine names; but after the introduction of the National Centre for Education Statistics 2004 Rule, there has been a change in the outlook of the term health literacy. The concept now stresses on all the important issues relating to basic healthcare information. The WHO identifies with the new functional aspect of health literacy. The concept of health literacy is very useful for clinical practice. As a clinic, it is the duty of the hospital to see to it that patients can read the correct medicine names, and has the correct information regarding health literacy. Literacy in the family should be screened before prescribing medication. The patient should be linked to resources which can increase the knowledge of the person in health care so that it proves beneficial to both the patient as well as the clinic for maintaining records. The American Medical Association lays special emphasis on the concept of health literacy in clinics. The concept of health literacy if practiced in clinic can help in maintaining records of people coming from different geographic areas with different diseases easily. Health literacy is appropriate for routine hospital care. The concept of health literacy in hospitals can help the patients to fill up healthcare forms faster. The concept of healthcare introduced in hospitals improves the whole community and as such helps in right diagnosis at the right time. The concept of health literacy in hospitals removes the communication gap between the doctor and the patient which may lead to wrong medication and in turn result in undesirable health conditions. People are scared to take tests such as mammography and cervical cancer screening in clinics, the reason being not aware of the importance of such tests. So, health literacy in clinics can make them aware of such tests and help the clinic in early determination of these diseases. Diseases like diabetes, asthma need proper care information, which if informed to patients through proper health literacy, can help in timely treatment of diseases. Also smoking and tobacco habits of people can be changed through proper health literacy programs from hospitals in the form of paper material or presentations. JAMA means The Journal of the American Medical Association which keeps all Doctors and health care executives to see the latest records of health literacy. The defining attributes or characteristics could be viewed with regard to differential diagnosis, which is fundamentally the question of health care specialists weighing the possibilities of different kinds of diseases against the symptoms produced and complained by the patient, before deciding which disease to be treated for. What doctors would possibly do would be eliminate several choices before zooming in to one particular disease that fits the symptoms accurately. Since diagnosis forms the core of any health care treatment, unless the diagnosis is perfect, the line of intervention does not work well. In the aspect of concept, what is important is that the line of treatment must fit the disease in order to ensure cure. Besides, ways and means need to be evolved that could attend myriad aspects of health care that presents itself in patients and even in same patients under different scenarios. There are many aspects with regard to differential diagnosis that health care specialists need to take into consideration, especially with regard to the need for best interests of patients. However, patients’ self-respect should be upheld at all times and health care workers need to acknowledge that they themselves need self-esteem in order to promote stateliness in others. Besides, those are also aspects that need to be enforced, especially with regard to what constitutes the best interests of patients and how it could be ensured. According to Walker and Avant (1995), the antecedents and events are considered as the events or incidents precede the emergence of the concept. Health literacy has emerged as a new concept in the area of health promotion research. The researchers have identified various problems that are associated with the concept. They have also analyzed the role of health literacy in creating self-care ability among the individuals. The concept of health literacy enables the people to change and adapt to the changing health conditions by applying both societal and cognitive skills. There are two antecedents for the concept of health literacy. They are literacy and health related experience. Literacy refers to the knowledge about health conditions and the various measures that have to be taken into consideration and through what ways the issues related to the health can be solved. There are various consequences of health literacy. They are lower health care cost, improvements in the self report health status, reducing rate of hospitalization, increasing health knowledge and decrease in the use of health care services. Before the emergence of the concept of health literacy, the level of health literacy was found to be very poor among the people and especially the adults. The events that occurred before the emergence of this concept are countless. The health condition of the population was very poor. There was no adequate health education among the adults. The adults were not having any knowledge about the medical care and medical conditions that were prevailing in the health care centers. Other related events are the comprehension of the medical information was decreased; lack of understanding about the use of preventive measures; the rate of self reported health was poor; the compliance rate was poor; the rate of hospitalization increased and the cost for the health care also increased. In the earlier days, the people were not aware of the treatment that is available for various sever diseases. The emergence of this concept is very much helpful for the society and it created a lot of impact on the life style of the people. Inadequate health literacy will lead to poor health conditions within the country. So, the health literacy rate of the people should be increased to improve the health conditions of the public. It is the responsibility of the health care centers to provide accurate and detailed knowledge regarding health care measures that have to be taken adjacent to the diseases that are stretched all over the world. After the emergence of this concept, a significant improvement in the health conditions has been found out. It was also found that the relationship between the health of the adult and the literacy is very high. The concept of health literacy has gained more popularity among the population and this has created a lot of impact in the life style of the people. The people are aware of the various diseases and the ways to overcome those diseases. The empirical measure of health literacy is testing functional literacy knowledge among the adult and the assessment of health component of National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) (National Center for Educational Statistics (2004) of the United States Department of Education. They mainly identify the various clusters that are related to health literacy. They understand the meaning of various health or clinic information such as, filling the data sheet which, is related to health care literacy, clearly assessing the information related to prevention through screening and navigating various healthcare information from various sources or sites and using this information for the completion of the insurance claims. All these are done to increase the health literacy rate among the adults and to bring out a healthy index score which reflects the population that they are given proper care. TOHFLA is a test which is conducted to evaluate the level of health knowledge possessed by the adult. This evaluates the functional health literacy level among the adults with a score of 75 to 100. This is a method of testing that has been used by various agencies to measure health literacy rate of adults. A clear analysis of the concept of health literacy will enhance the ability of the nurses to assess the health level of the clients in an appropriate manner. This will enable them to create a healthier population in the country and it also reduces the risk of probability of errors in the health care service sectors as the clients are more aware of diseases and the treatments available. It is widely believed that the health care enforcement and deployment is more often than not in the domains of nursing community and perhaps not as much as health care doctors or specialists, whose role may not be as self –perpetrating as that of nurses and health care support services. Works Cited Glassman, Penny. Health Literacy. National Library of Medicine. 5 Jan. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2010. . Read More