Health Literacy

Health literacy is identified as one of the essential components of complete care asserted by the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (Forrester, 2018) . Health literacy is important as it helps in informed decision making, medicine adherence, as well as effective self-management of the health condition. Therefore, in chronic health conditions where life long management is required, health literacy plays an important role (Poureslami et al., 2017). Poor literacy in management of conditions like chronic kidney disease (CKD) can result in exacerbation of health condition that can serve to be fatal. The management of the disease requires multimodal care and therefore poor health literacy can emerge as a barrier. Health literacy can, therefore, must be stressed by the care professionals as a primary priority to ensure the self-management of CKD and for the beneficence of the patient. To limit the barriers imposed by literacy on self-management, education programs must be organized for patients, with regular follow-ups to supervise the health condition and self-management regimens (Jacobs et al., 2016). Visual presentations and management guidelines must be issued to the patient as well as their primary carers to promote effective management of CKD. Linguistic barriers must also be acknowledged that hamper the health literacy for disease management and thus a multilingual mode of instructions should be facilitated. Telemedicine and healthcare services for medicine reminders and lifestyle changes should also be used to educate the patient and ensure self-management (Batterham et al., 2016)

References for Common Barriers to Self-Management

Batterham, R. W., Hawkins, M., Collins, P. A., Buchbinder, R., & Osborne, R. H. (2016). Health literacy: applying current concepts to improve health services and reduce health inequalities. Public Health, 132, 3-12. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350616000044

Forrester, K. (2018). Codes of Conduct-A New Era for Nursing and Midwifery in Australia. Journal of Law and Medicine, 25(4), 929-933. https://europepmc.org/article/med/29978676

Jacobs, R. J., Lou, J. Q., Ownby, R. L., & Caballero, J. (2016). A systematic review of eHealth interventions to improve health literacy. Health Informatics Journal, 22(2), 81-98. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1460458214534092

Poureslami, I., Nimmon, L., Rootman, I., & Fitzgerald, M. J. (2017). Health literacy and chronic disease management: drawing from expert knowledge to set an agenda. Health Promotion International, 32(4), 743-754. https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article-abstract/32/4/743/2951003

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