Literacy and Its Impact on Public Health, Essay Example

Public health literacy is one of the fields that is emerging and is designed to cover a number of major issues, which affect the lives of the population. Public health address factors of public concern such as globalization, poverty, and climate change. In the past, health literacy always took a role of a personalized and an individual view. However, public health literacy encompass many aspects and takes a broad look at the social, systemic and ecological forces that affect the health of the general population at large (Schwartzberg120).

The significance of health literacy cannot be over emphasized since its importance outweighs the problems that come alongside low public literacy. Low public literacy is associated with problems such as difficulty in understanding the concepts of public health; it hampers participation of one on major healthcare practices and compromising the seeking of information regarding health matters. It is for these reasons that public health literacy is regarded as one of the core disciplines that is key to a healthy population (Freedman et al 446).

There is a close link between the healthcare outcomes and literacy level and this suggests that the educators in healthcare play significant role in creating a maximization of the healthcare status and general good health of the whole population. In summary, the general health of the population is determined by their level of literacy. The higher the literacy level, the better the health status of the population at large.

References

“Health Literacy and Public Health: A Framework for Developing Skills and Empowering Citizens.” Perspectives in Public Health (2012): 23-24. Print.

“Measuring Health Literacy: Moving towards a Health – Promotion Perspective.”International Journal of Public Health: 169-70. Print.

“Understanding and Health Literacy.” Perspectives in Public Health (2012): 25. Print.

Freedman, Darcy A et al. ‘Public Health Literacy Defined’. American journal of preventive medicine36.5 (2009): 446–451. Print.

Schwartzberg, Joanne G, Jonathan VanGeest, and Claire Wang. Understanding Health Literacy: Implications for Medicine and Public Health. Chicago, Ill.: American Medical Association, 2005. Print.