8
Health literacy and health information producers
The survey
Although understanding and improving
health literacy should be a key objective for
anyone who works in the field of consumer
health information, health literacy is relatively
poorly understood. Few organisations appear
to implement specific strategies to address
the issue.
The rising importance of health literacy
has generated interest among information
producers and providers, along with a desire
to develop skills and expertise in this area.
Whereas in the United States health literacy
is embedded widely in policy and practice,
in the UK no overarching strategy exists
and little is known about what information
producers are doing in this area.
The PiF survey aimed to develop an insight
into health literacy from the information
producer perspective; exploring whether
information producers know what health
literacy means to their users, how important
they think it is, whether they have developed
specific strategies to address the needs of
people with low health literacy and how
these strategies are implemented.
Understanding the existing knowledge
base among information producers, and the
provision they make for developing resources
and services is an important factor in the
development of future strategies to begin to
address the needs of this group.
