About health literacy

The Canadian Public Health Association defines health literacy as:

"Skills to enable access, understanding and use of information for health"

With one of the most highly educated populations in the world and a publicly funded health-care system, Canada has a growing appreciation for the contributions that ongoing learning make to the health and well-being of individuals and to the quality of life within our communities.

However, these health literacy maps of Canada show that our country is not a picture of health. Six in 10 Canadian adults do not have the literacy skills needed to adequately manage their health and health-care needs.

This is partly explained by understanding that health literacy is more complex than general literacy. Mastering health-literacy tasks requires the use of more than one literacy skill—prose, document and numeracy—often simultaneously.

Still, this incidence of low health literacy is cause for concern.

Canadians with the lowest health-literacy skills were found to be more than 2.5 times as likely to be in fair or poor health as those with the highest skill levels, less than half as likely to have participated in a community group or to have volunteered, and more than 2.5 times as likely to be receiving income support.

Added to this is evidence from CCL that the prevalence of diabetes increases significantly as health literacy decreases. A similar relationship, although not as strong, is found for high blood pressure.