Health Literacy: A Whole New Skillset

As the way people access health information evolves, NHS libraries find new ways to support their patrons.

Although it’s still very early for the new UK government that came to power on 5 July 2024, it’s been apparent from the start that health is going to be a major focus. Part of this will almost certainly mean that everyone will need better knowledge and understanding of the health conditions that affect them and their nearest and dearest.

Given that health literacy is very low in the UK and the fact that so much health information can be incredibly complex and confusing, we’re always on the lookout for ways we can make it more accessible to library users.

Several factors can contribute to low levels of health literacy, including education, income, age, language barriers, health status, and cultural beliefs. All of these factors affect the North West of England, including the catchment area for the hospital where I work.

The area is fairly typical of an area that was once very reliant on heavy industry like mining, shipbuilding, textiles, manufacturing, and other skills. Combined with a damp climate, old housing stock, and short summers, it’s not very surprising that for much of the population, health is a major concern. Health literacy, however, remains particularly low in this part of the country. 

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There are plenty of different definitions out there of health literacy, but all of them come down to the ability to access, understand, and use information and services to make informed decisions about one’s health. Health literacy is a very complex issue, and a huge part of our work in NHS libraries is making sure our clinical staff members have access to up-to-date information more than ever.

Although health literacy is a major concern all year round, a more formal Health Literacy Month takes place in the UK every October. The focus in health libraries is on how we can help patients and members of the public understand health information so they can make more informed decisions. Although we have not been able to work with the local public libraries this year, we’re already investigating options for next year.

We do our best to support health literacy throughout the year in a range of ways:  providing access to information that’s clear and concise, making sure it’s available in different formats and even different languages, and ensuring that the language used is as plain and simple as possible. We also need to tailor the information to different audiences and make sure we stay up to date with our own training.

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Sometimes, this follows serious cases that make the national news when patients have not had the care they should, sometimes with tragic results. This year, that has included several training sessions as part of the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training on Learning Disability and Autism. One of the most interesting sessions for me personally involved learning from co-workers and others connected with the Trust—who had direct experience with a range of conditions—how we could best support them.

As almost every health literacy course I’d completed had strongly suggested Easy Read guides as a way to make information easier to access, it was an excellent learning point for me to find out that not everyone found this approach useful. It was a timely reminder that everyone is an individual, and when providing support for health literacy, we need to take that into account.

As Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini become more widespread, part of our role is also to make sure our clinical users have the skills they need to help distinguish between what is valid information and what has been “hallucinated” or simply made up by the AI.

One of the next areas for us as a service to investigate will be how, and even whether, or at least whether we should, incorporate AI into what we offer our users.

Visit www.everylibrary.org to learn more about our work on behalf of libraries. 

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