What part of your district would benefit most from a literacy program? What’s the average health literacy level in the neighbourhoods surrounding your hospital? This kind of granular data on literacy and health literacy levels is now available at a glance, thanks to interactive online literacy maps created by the Canadian Council on Learning.
Both maps allows you to zoom in and get data on a particular neighbourhood or zoom out and see the patchwork of different literacy levels within a city, town or region. The adult prose literacy map displays levels of prose literacy – that is, the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from text, such as news stories, editorials, poems and fiction. According to the 2003 data, nearly half of all Canadian adults have low prose literacy levels (level 2 or below), meaning they are ill-prepared for the current demands of society.
The health literacy map paints a picture that's even more sobering. As many of you know, health literacy is defined as a set of skills that “enable access, understanding and use of information for health" (Canadian Public Health Association). Health literacy is more complex than general literacy. According to the Canadian Council on Learning, “mastering health-literacy tasks requires the use of more than one literacy skill — prose, document and numeracy — often simultaneously.” Health literacy is what helps you follow the advice in your hospital discharge instructions or figure out how much acetaminophen to give your 19-pound baby: important stuff. But the data show that six in 10 Canadian adults do not have the literacy skills needed to adequately manage their health and health-care needs. “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.”
Are you surprised by these findings? Do you plan to use this data or show this map to you colleagues?