Eastern Washington University’s online Master of Public Health (MPH) – General program equips graduates to address complex public health challenges across a wide range of professional roles, including the role of public health educator. Today, most public health roles involve an element of health education, whether sharing factual, actionable data as a biostatistician or helping the public understand disease transmission as an epidemiologist. Improving health literacy is one essential benefit of these and other public health roles.
EWU’s online MPH program can be completed in as few as 14 months through a 60-credit-hour curriculum that prepares graduates to analyze public health issues, develop community programs and assess outcomes. The program’s coursework bridges theory and real-world application, giving students a broad foundation for addressing the social and organizational factors that shape population health.
What Are the Types of Health Literacy and Why Do They Matter?
Health literacy is a recognized social determinant of health and a primary focus of public health initiatives for the coming decade. Health literacy has two components: Personal and organizational. Both serve as foundational principles and goals of Healthy People 2030, a campaign led by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion to establish measurable national objectives that advance the public’s health and well-being.
- Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals can find, understand and use available information and services to make informed healthcare decisions for themselves and others, such as their children.
- Organizational health literacy assesses how equitably healthcare organizations make information and services accessible to individuals so they can make informed healthcare decisions for themselves and others.
Examples of Health Literacy in the Real World
Real-world health literacy examples include struggling to interpret a prescription label, follow discharge instructions or navigate insurance paperwork. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when organizations share information that is too difficult to understand, they create a health literacy problem, and when they expect people to navigate complex or conflicting service steps, they compound that problem.
Individuals with limited health literacy may struggle to interpret written or spoken health information, like directions given by providers, making it challenging to adhere to treatment plans. As a result, they often experience worse health outcomes and difficulty navigating the healthcare system. Similarly, when an organization fails to provide community members with the same level of access to information and services, that group’s quality of care declines.
In addition to poorer outcomes, people without adequate health literacy face higher hospitalization rates, more frequent emergency room visits and serious medication errors. Generally, the groups most likely to struggle with health literacy include the uninsured, racial and ethnic minorities, people aged 65 and older and those living below the poverty level.
What Are Healthy People 2030’s Health Literacy Goals?
Healthy People 2030 elevates health literacy as both a foundational principle and an overarching goal, committing to “eliminate health disparities, achieve improved health for all people, and attain health literacy to improve the health and well-being of all.” The initiative identifies six objectives to strengthen personal and organizational health literacy and improve care quality, outcomes and overall wellness of individuals and their communities:
- Increase the proportion of adults whose healthcare provider checked their understanding
- Decrease the proportion of adults who report poor communication with their healthcare provider
- Increase the proportion of adults whose healthcare providers involved them in decisions as much as they wanted
- Increase the proportion of people who say their online medical record is easy to understand
- Increase the proportion of adults with limited English proficiency who say their providers explain things clearly
- Increase the health literacy of the population
Who is Responsible for Teaching Health Literacy?
All healthcare professionals are responsible for fostering health literacy, and each can take action to improve it. Their efforts, cumulatively, inform public health policy and education. While the primary source of health education has historically occurred during a healthcare encounter, public health campaigns increasingly extend into schools, workplaces, homes and community spaces. Access to social media also expands the ability to customize messaging and reach more people.
Public health educators assist in identifying critical public health issues and developing targeted programs to meet the needs of individuals and at-risk populations. They can create campaigns using jargon-free language to emphasize the most important points and offer supplemental resources, such as videos and handouts. These efforts play a direct role in reducing health disparities and advancing equity across communities.
Improving health literacy through public health education is a core component of fostering an informed public, achieving health equity and combating misinformation and stigma that exacerbate health disparities. EWU’s online MPH program prepares graduates with the evidence-based skills and systems-level perspective needed to drive meaningful improvements in health literacy, equity and overall population health.
Learn more about Eastern Washington University’s online Master of Public Health – General program.
