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Measures of Health Literacy Workshop Summary (2009) / Chapter Skim
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6 Measuring Health Literacy: What? So What? Now What?
Pages 91-98

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From page 91...
... emory Uniersity School of Medicine Seven years ago the Institute of Medicine Committee on Health Lit eracy set out to define the scope of health literacy and to develop a set of basic indicators that could be used to assess the extent of problems in health literacy at the individual, community, and national levels. Although that committee's report set the base for future direction, not enough was known at that time to develop measures at these various levels.
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From page 92...
... More than 300 studies have documented that health material demand exceeds the ability of those who need to use the material. The new Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Health Skills/Abilities Demands/Complexity Literacy FIguRE 6-1 Health literacy framework.
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From page 93...
... The medication label on a pill bottle provides a good example of achieving health literacy by balancing skills and abilities with demands and complexity. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL)
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From page 94...
... Indicators are needed that reflect progress toward the goal of aligning skills and abilities with demands and complexities. Her wish list for measures of skills and abilities, Parker said, includes the following: • There should be an ongoing national data repository of health lit eracy measures of skills and abilities within the U.S.
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From page 95...
... From her perspective health literacy is not in and of itself the ultimate path to a solution for health care problems, but rather a prime layer that cuts across many areas including quality, safety, and cost. Developing measurements that allow linkage with these important variables is timely and critical.
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From page 96...
... The first set has the skills the individual patient or consumer brings to the contact with the health care system, the skills that enable activity on his or her own behalf. A second set of individual skills and abilities are those that the individual provider of care brings to the interaction at the point of contact with an individual patient.
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From page 97...
... One participant, who identified himself as working in the area of shared decision making, suggested that the newly appropriated money available for studies of comparative effectiveness should include a greater focus on the side of Figure 6-1 that lists skills and abilities. Apparently the vast majority of those dollars will be devoted to the red arrow or right side, which is the side one might call the supply side of health care services, devices, and drugs.
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From page 98...
... Much of what has been presented could be of great value to these international efforts.
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Key Terms

  • individual skills
  • measuring health
  • individual patient
  • health lit
  • individual health

  • health indicators
  • usa health
  • report state
  • social determinants
  • literacy means

  • participant asked
  • perspective health
  • health quality
  • viewing health
  • promoting health

  • low health
  • determine health
  • incorporating health
  • putting health
  • listed health

  • achieving health
  • health reform
  • affect health
  • reflect health
  • functional health

  • report health
  • healthy people
  • tool kit
  • enable research
  • balancing skills


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