What is Health Literacy?

The ability to obtain, understand, and use the information needed to make wise health choices is known as health literacy. Low health literacy can affect anyone, regardless of age, race, education or income. People with low health literacy often lack not only the ability to read well but also knowledge about the body, its functioning, and the nature and causes of different types of disease, as well as how to access and use the health care system.

...and Why it Matters
Low health literacy costs the nation’s health system as much as $58 billion each year. Patients with low health literacy have poorer health outcomes including knowledge, intermediate disease markers, measures of morbidity, generally health status, and use of health resources. Patients with low health literacy are 1.5 to 3 times more likely to experience poor health outcomes.

About the North Carolina Health Literacy Council

The Guilford County Health Literacy Forum, founded in 2005, is a coalition of community agencies collaborating to identify community health literacy needs and develop a plan to address priority areas. We've made it our mission to make Health Literacy a statewide priority through programs of awareness, professional education, collaboration, and best practice dissemination, with the vision of excellent health care for all North Carolinians.

Our objectives include:

• Increase the capacity of health systems and health care professionals to meet the education needs of low-literate patients
• Implement a readability service to create and disseminate low-literacy materials and to modify provider materials to a low-literacy format
• Conduct a state-wide media campaign to raise awareness of health literacy issues
• Conduct ongoing participatory action research to determine best practices for addressing the needs of those with low health literacy
• Encourage non-traditional collaborations and partnerships to build community capacity to address local health concerns

What can I do?

We offer several health literacy training seminars to to learn about Health Literacy and how you can help. Visit our get involved page to learn about the seminars, or see our events page for dates and times.