To determine what barriers prevent patients with low health literacy from navigating a health care system, it's important for organizations to do an inventory.
Instead of handing patients piles of papers during the discharge planning process, case managers and social workers at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ, simply refer them to the hospital's Valley C.A.R.E.S. web site, a resource with links to more than 2,000 agencies, facilities, organizations, and informational sites.
Health literacy, according to the Institute of Medicine, is "the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions" and research has shown that patients are not all created equal.
There are many resources that help health care institutions develop strategies for teaching people how to appropriately access health care and use it to their best interest.
Education about skin cancer is still needed, says Linda K. Franks, MD, FAAD, director of Gramercy Park Dermatology in New York City, though it is common to see adults on vacation making little effort to avoid the known risks for skin cancer, which is exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
It's time to redouble efforts to stem adolescent pregnancy. Preliminary birth statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate the U.S. birth rate rose by 3% between 2005 and 2006 among females 15-19 after dropping 34% between 1991 and 2005.
Patients with limited arthritis in their knees typically had to live with pain and discomfort or wait until deterioration reached a point at which they could undergo a total knee replacement, but new technology gives patients a third option that allows them to return to normal activity without pain earlier in their lives.
Just 35% of heart attack survivors reported receiving outpatient cardiac rehabilitation services when surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The more scientists and public health officials learn about HIV prevention, the more they realize that targeting specific cultural and demographic groups of people who are not infected is a costly and labor-intensive venture.