Raising Awareness About Health Literacy
10/18/2011 04:24:00 PM Posted by CHASS Communications
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| R.V. Rikard |
Health literacy--the ability to read, understand, and act on health-related
information--poses an enormous challenge to improving health and to lowering healthcare
costs in the United States. Federal
policies and agencies, such as Healthy
People 2020, the 10-year
agenda for improving national health, and
the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) recognize the importance of health literacy. By some accounts, low health literacy is
estimated to cost the U.S. health care system more than $58 billion
annually. Yet many health care providers, payers and policymakers remain
largely unaware of the extent of the problem. (See the Partnership for Clear Health Communication for more details.)
For R.V. Rikard, a doctoral student in sociology, the passion to improve health literacy grew out of work with the Communities and Health Disparities project led by Maxine Thompson in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at NC State. "The project brought together a group of sociology graduate
students and faculty members, the Alliance of AIDS Services - Carolina, and members of the African-American community," he said. "We knew that low health literacy is linked to risk-taking behaviors that result in sexually transmitted infections. So we focused on developing a culturally sensitive HIV health literacy toolkit to raise HIV awareness in the African-American community."
As part of Health Literacy Month this October, Rikard and other professionals around the country--practitioners, policymakers, and researchers alike--are making a concerted effort to raise awareness about health literacy. "I advocate for a broad, diverse, multi-disciplinary coalition of
practitioners, researchers, advocates, and most importantly people from
all walks of life, to examine and understand how health literacy connects
to age, sex, race/ethnicity, residential location, income, education, and other areas," he said.
RV recently contributed a blog post for a series on the national "Engaging the Patient" site from his perspective as a sociologist. The site features a roster of national experts sharing their take on the challenges of health literacy in America.
RV and his co-author's research is also featured in a special issue of The Journal of Health Communication focused on an approach to health literacy measurement.
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