Health information abounds and comes at us from all directions: social media, friends, the news, and public health announcements when we are lucky.
Even as a trained researcher, keeping up with the latest trends and effective interventions is challenging. However, before we can even evaluate any article or health recommendation tidbit, we need to have the skills to do so, and specifically, our behavioral repertoire must include health literacy.
What is Health Literacy?
Think about a recent health change that you made. Before making that change, you likely did some research on what to do next.
How well you can take effective action relies on health literacy.
Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others (Santana et al., 2021).
Let’s review these three step further.
Step 1: Find Health Information.
Where do you look? Text books? Social Media? A pamphlet in your doctor’s office?
Do you actively seek out health information? If so, what is your process?
Or, are you passively letting health information land in your world?
As a behavior analyst, my north star for health information always checks back to peer-reviewed research. In a world of noise and misinformation, I find myself going back to the primary source of truth – research.
Sure, we can “Google It”, but finding health information is just the first step of the health literacy process.
Step 2: Understand Health Information.
Public health professionals task themselves to reach the masses with simple and easy to understand health facts and information. That is, what needs to be communicated in the easiest way possible?
Depending on the complexity of the topic, to understand, you may need to do a little more research to brush up on your vocabulary. For example, in the world of physical activity research, before I can even take action for myself or when coaching others, I need to fluently understand acronyms such as LPA, MVPA and VPA; light-,moderate-vigorous, and vigorous physical activity respectively.
We can find exercise recommendations but we need to also understand the differences content itself: resting heart rate, target heart rate zones, rate of perceived exertion (RPE), etc…
Step 3: Use Information To Take Action.
This is million dollar question is this: when given the best information, can you apply what you’ve learned to your own life?
Often, this is a barrier to meaningful behavior change.
Find the information. Check.
Understand the information and what to do. Check.
Implementing the change in my life. Crickets.
Health Literacy Example
Take the most common exercise recommendation today.
The recommendation asks us engage in 150 minutes of moderate-vigorous physical activity every week. For the rest of our lives.
- Exercise recommendations are found on most government health-related website. Even here at behaviorift.om
- Each of these minutes needs to be above our resting heart rate.
- Make a change that is sustainable
If you are reading this blog and are not meeting this recommendation, ask yourself:
- For you, do you meet that today?
- To begin, is 150 minutes too much, too little?
- How do you start?
- What barriers are in the way?
This is where coaching comes. A trained expert in your corner help complete the health literacy action step.
Health literacy is a foundation skill or characteristic of those seeking to make change for the better. Consider any change that you want to make, do you have the literacy that will support your goals?
Reference:
Santana, S., Brach, C., Harris, L., Ochiai, E., Blakey, C., Bevington, F., Kleinman, D., & Pronk, N. (2021). Updating Health Literacy for Healthy People 2030: Defining Its Importance for a New Decade in Public Health. Journal of public health management and practice : JPHMP, 27(Suppl 6), S258–S264. https://doi.org/10.1097/PHH.0000000000001324
