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The Impact of Health Literacy on the Healthcare System

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Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Public Health in Europe

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Abstract

Health literacy can be understood as a decision-making competency, it describes the ability to find sufficient information, to understand, to asses and apply them in order to obtain health and alleviate disease. The healthcare industry of the twenty-first century is facing many changes. The aging society, fast-evolving government regulations, the shortage of skilled professionals, technological innovations and the role change in relationship between health-care workers and patients, creating an environment in which health literacy is considered as an essential requirement for consumers of the healthcare system (Schaeffer et al., 2017). This is mirrored by the fact that health literacy has been on the agenda of the World Health Organization (WHO) throughout the last two centuries. It has first been mentioned in the global conference on health promotion in Jakarta in 1997 (WHO, 1997), later named as a “key action” in the WHO Bangkok Charter for Health promotion in a Globalized World (WHO, 2005) and recently positioned as one of three key pillars for achieving sustainable development in the Shanghai Declaration on health promotion (WHO, 2016). This article will discuss the purpose of health literacy for the healthcare system and provides the actual state of the international scientific discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Former Research Fellow, FOM University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany

    Laura Eichhorn

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  1. Laura Eichhorn
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Correspondence to Laura Eichhorn .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ifgs, FOM University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany

    Manfred Cassens

  2. Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Zsófia Kollányi

  3. FDIBA, Technical University Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Aleksandar Tsenov

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Eichhorn, L. (2022). The Impact of Health Literacy on the Healthcare System. In: Cassens, M., Kollányi, Z., Tsenov, A. (eds) Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Public Health in Europe. FOM-Edition(). Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33740-7_4

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