Dr. Annette
Hi, everybody. I wanted to talk to you today about health literacy as I progress and move on this journey of self-care and researching and writing about, the womanness ethic of care and what self-care looks like for us, one of the main elements or the main, strategies for self-care is health literacy. So what is health literacy? And so you can find definitions of health literacy from the centers for disease control, and the national institutes of health, In my mind they're everywhere, but health literacy involves the information that people like you, and I need to be able to make good decisions about our health. So there's, this personal health literacy and it's about how well we, as individuals can find and understand the health information and services that we need for ourselves. And even for our families, it's about using that information and, services so that we can make good health decisions and good health choices.
So what impact, what impacts our health literacy there are so many different, things that can impact our knowledge and understanding of, health. It could be just, the medical words, the terminology that's being used, how healthcare systems work, how we communicate with our healthcare providers, and how they, in turn, communicate with us and treat us, is the ability to find health information, which might require computer skills. Yes, we can, do Google search research, but maybe we need to go to the library and look some things up, reading, writing, numerical skills, and then other important factors are important socioeconomic factors, age, income, education, language, abilities, and culture impact our health literacy. And then if we have any, physical or, mental limitations that just, any cognitive limitations that might impact our ability to understand, what's happening with our health and the ability to understand health information. So many of them, it's also understood that many people who are at risk of having limited, health literacy also are influenced by health disparities.
I talked about this in a previous video, but again, health disparities are health differences between different groups of people, based on age, race, gender, and other, sociocultural factors. So it's important that we have the ability to make good decisions about our health and the health of our family. And as we, always do, we're also thinking about our community. We need to get the medical care that we need, and this includes preventative care, which is the ability to prevent any anomalies or illnesses in our bodies. How do we take our medications correctly, manage any chronic disease that we have, and then the ability to health literacy helps us plan and strategize about leading a healthy lifestyle? So that's just briefly on health literacy. There will be more, but these are just, a few things that I thought would be helpful as we are on our journey to self-care. Talk to you soon.