Health literacy is a part of all our lives, as it affects our ability to make well-informed decisions in everyday life on healthcare, disease prevention, and health promotion. Health literacy is essential to maintaining and improving the quality of life during the life course (Sørensen et al., 2012). According to the World Health Organization, WHO, ‘health literacy represents the cognitive and social skills which determine the motivation and ability of individuals to gain access to, understand and use information in ways which promote and maintain good health’ (WHO, 1998).
However, being a health-literate person in modern societies is a growing challenge. We are bombarded with information and misinformation, which has grown even stronger during the Covid-19 pandemic. We are being challenged to make healthy lifestyle choices and find our way through complex environments and healthcare systems (Kickbusch et al., 2013; Paakkari & Okan, 2020). Furthermore, people do not have the same prerequisites to be equally literate in terms of health, which is why health literacy is also associated with inequity in health. For example, individuals with lower literate and educational skills, the elderly, the chronically ill, and different migrant groups including refugees are at risk of having limited health literacy (Wångdahl & Sørensen, 2020; WHO, 2016).
It is important to start promoting personal health literacy early in life, where the education system can play a focal role in teaching and strengthening the personal skills and competencies related to health literacy (Nutbeam, 2000). Also, health literacy is not fixed and can be improved throughout life with adequate and effective information, communication, and education adapted to the right contextual situation in life. The environments that we inhabit should also be made more responsive to health literacy issues: for example, healthcare organisations should meet the health literacy needs and preferences of the people and communities they serve (Trezona et al., 2017). This approach is also referred to as organisational health literacy.
But most of all, it requires political support, action, and commitment to improve and ensure an adequate level of health literacy in a population. Politicians create the policies and frameworks for the cultural context in which individuals are born, grow up and live, and under which the healthcare system operates. Therefore, politicians have a responsibility to prioritise health literacy as a part of these policies and frameworks to ensure equity in health in a population that is constantly changing, also demographically (Kickbusch et al., 2013).