Creating Patient Education Materials

Health literacy is a central focus of Healthy People 2030: “Eliminate health disparities, achieve health equity, and attain health literacy to improve the health and well-being of all.”

Healthy People 2030 addresses both personal health literacy and organizational health literacy and provides the following definitions:

• Personal 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.
• Organizational health literacy is the degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.

The new definitions:

• Emphasize people’s ability to use health information rather than just understand it
• Focus on the ability to make “well-informed” decisions rather than “appropriate” ones
• Incorporate a public health perspective
• Acknowledge that organizations have a responsibility to address health literacy

https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/health-literacy-healthy-people-2030

Additional resources on what is health literacy

CDC:  What Is Health Literacy?

NNLM: An Introduction to Health Literacy