Low health literacy: Overview, assessment, and steps toward providing high-quality diabetes care

Abstract

Approximately half of all Americans do not understand written and verbal health information well enough to take appropriate action. For chronic conditions requiring patients' ongoing self-management, limited literacy may be a powerful barrier to achieving optimal outcomes. Because low literacy is associated with a number of psychosocial variables that also act as barriers to self-management, health literacy experts recommend that efforts to alleviate the burden introduced by low literacy be addressed not only by developing means of increasing patients' understanding, but also by integrating such efforts into systems aiming to improve self-management support across the continuum of patient care. This article provides an overview of efforts to define, assess, and improve the quality of diabetes care provided to those with limited health literacy.