Kristine Sørensen

Global Health Literacy Academy

Background: Health literacy concerns the knowledge and competences of persons to meet the complex demands of health in modern society. Although its importance is increasingly recognised, there is no consensus about the definition of health literacy or about its conceptual dimensions, which limits the possibilities for measurement and comparison. Th...

The human and social implications of poor health literacy are substantial and wide-ranging. Health literacy represents the personal competencies and organizational structures, resources and commitment that enable people to access, understand, appraise and use information and services in ways that promote and maintain good health. A large-scale soci...

Health literacy measurement is important to improve equity, health and well-being as part of health system transformation. However, health literacy data of good quality are often lacking or difficult to access for decision-makers. To better inform policy, research and practice, this paper discusses how to move from project-based health literacy dat...

Despite notable scientific and medical advances, broader political, socioeconomic and behavioural factors continue to undercut the response to the COVID-19 pandemic1,2. Here we convened, as part of this Delphi study, a diverse, multidisciplinary panel of 386 academic, health, non-governmental organization, government and other experts in COVID-19 r...

Background A comprehensive and agreed-upon definition of vaccine literacy (VL) could support the understanding of vaccination and help policy-makers and individuals make informed decisions about vaccines. Methods To shed some light on this debate and provide clarity, a scoping review was conducted to collect, summarize, and analyse available defin...

This paper addresses the critical role of health literacy during the COVID-19 infodemic and provides recommendations for decision-makers regarding how health literacy can be advanced as an empowering resource to mitigate the harmful effects of future infodemics. Based on a comprehensive literature review, key areas concerning health literacy are id...

New innovations are influencing many parts of our daily life. One of the waves of new technology involves the implementation of new information and communication technologies in the realm of health, which is also often called Smart health. Smart health entails the use of technology that leads to better diagnostic tools, better treatment for patient...

The GUIDE TO HEALTH LITERACY CONTRIBUTING TO TRUST BUILDING AND EQUITABLE ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE was commissioned by Council of Europe. It was approved in November 2022 and published in January 2023. Suggested citation: GUIDE TO HEALTH LITERACY CONTRIBUTING TO TRUST BUILDING AND EQUITABLE ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE. Strasbourg: Council of Europe; 2023.

Background Accurate and precise measures of health literacy (HL) is supportive for health policy making, tailoring health service design, and ensuring equitable access to health services. According to research, valid and reliable unidimensional HL measurement instruments explicitly targeted at young people (YP) are scarce. Thus, this study aims at...

Despite notable scientific and medical advances, broader political, socioeconomic and behavioural factors continue to undercut the response to the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2 . Here we convened, as part of this Delphi study, a diverse, multidisciplinary panel of 386 academic, health, non-governmental organization, government and other experts in COVID-19...

Implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical decision-making is still in early development. We developed an AI robot intervention prototype with a health literacy-friendly interface that uses interactive voice response (IVR) surveying to assist in decision-making for weight loss. The weight-specific health literacy instrument (WSHLI) a...

Despite notable scientific and medical advances, broader political, socioeconomic and behavioural factors continue to undercut the response to the COVID-19 pandemic1,2. Here we convened, as part of this Delphi study, a diverse, multidisciplinary panel of 386 academic, health, non-governmental organization, government and other experts in COVID-19 r...

Health literacy is a public health challenge that should not be neglected in the efforts to accomplish the moonshot project such as the European Health Union. Health literacy encompasses peoples' knowledge and competencies to manage health and navigate health systems. However, many face difficulties in finding, understanding, judging, and using inf...

Obesity is a complex multifactorial disease defined by excessive adiposity and is linked to an increased risk for many noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). The report highlights the importance of including prevention and control of obesity within measures to build back better in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Addressing obesity is critical towards...

This policy brief was commissioned by and developed in collaboration with Global Self-Care Federation.

Health literacy entails the knowledge, motivation, and competencies to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information in order to make judgments and decisions in everyday life concerning health care, disease prevention, and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life throughout the life course. It has become an essential con...

Purpose New models of thinking, organization and governance are needed when health systems are under pressure. Inspired by a recent Danish community project called Your Health, this paper sheds light on the nexus of health promotion, sport and well-being, and how an increased focus on synergies can improve public health capacity in the future. Des...

Infectious diseases will continue to disrupt modern societies if we do not establish better hygiene literacy to enable a systems approach to hygienical design and planning, wider population access to and uptake of practices, and a strategically better use of cleaning and hygiene as trusted methods to reduce infections. The article introduces the co...

In recent years health literacy received increased attention in research, policy and practice in Europe. The outcomes of the European Health Literacy Project from 2009 to 2012 are presented including the definition, the conceptual model and the results of the European Health Literacy Survey which measured health literacy in eight European countries...

Background: With regard to children and adolescents, health literacy should only not be understood as an individual ability, but rather as dependent based on its contextual determinants. The study examines how experts define health literacy in childhood and adolescence and discusses whether they include these factors. Methods: In 48 interviews wi...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a novel virus in the coronavirus family, causing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Biomedical vaccines are key but alongside biomedical vaccines, a social vaccine can be similarly useful to prevent infection from SARS-CoV-2, if applied as a health promotion strategy. In order to...

For years Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has served as a key indicator of human progress and "successful" societies. Unfortunately, GDP has failed to robustly capture the human experience or predict resilience through crises; and obscures the presence of inequity -- a key determinant of suffering. It is clear the global community needs a new organizi...

Community engagement is crucial for controlling disease outbreak and mitigating natural and industrial disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic has reconfirmed the need to elevate community engagement to build equity, trust and sustained action in future health promotion preparedness strategies. Using the health promotion strategy of strengthening communit...

Background/Research Topics/Partner Countries In Europe, interest has grown in measuring the health literacy (HL) of the adult population in relation to public health, disease prevention, and health promotion to inform health policy in the new millennium, partly building on a longer tradition of measuring HL, but with a focus on patients, in the US...

Heath literacy, the ability of individuals to understand, critically appraise and use information related to their health, is an important component of education and has become more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Approaches to improving health literacy education in schools are lacking in many European countries. This report makes the case...

Background: The growing concern of low health literacy in populations combined with the interest of companies to develop cultures of health and the emerging interest in the workplace as an arena for improving health literacy is increasingly acknowledged. This study aimed to explore how companies currently apply the concept of health literacy as pa...

Studies evaluating the influence of health literacy on patient behavior and outcomes suggest a positive relationship between health literacy and health knowledge, health behaviors, and health status. In Latin American countries, studies assessing health literacy are few, regional, and demonstrate considerable variation, with reported rates of adequ...

Within the scope of the Health Literacy Action Plan 2019- 2021 and the collaboration with the WHO Action Network on Measuring Population and Organizational Health Literacy (M-POHL), the Directorate-General of Health assessed the health literacy levels of the Portuguese population in 2020 and 2021 to inform the promotion of the population ́s health....

The current COVID-19 pandemic has exposed missing links between health promotion and national/global health emergency policies. In response, health promotion initiatives were urgently developed and applied around the world. A selection of case studies from five countries, based on the Socio-Ecological Model of Health Promotion, exemplify ‘real-worl...

Background: Health literacy is a determinant of health and assessed globally to inform the development of health interventions. However, little is known about health literacy in countries with one of the poorest health indicators worldwide, such as Afghanistan. Studies worldwide demonstrate that women play a key role in developing health literacy....

Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, the term ‘social distancing’ received immense attention in the mainstream and social media and was embraced by governments as a universal precaution to stem the coronavirus pandemic. ‘Social distancing’ belongs technically to a set of non-pharmaceutical infection control actions intended to stop or slow down the spread...

This chapter studies health literacy champions and their leadership. Recognizing the important role of health literacy champions for re-designing and re-orienting health systems towards people-centredness as the World Health Organization pledged to do, this chapter aims to explore how health literacy champions are characterized and nurtured as chan...

Background: Health literacy is increasingly being recognized as a widespread public health challenge in Europe. This commentary explores the importance of health literacy amongst cancer patients (ie, cancer literacy) and examines how cancer literacy can be improved through the practical application of health literacy principles within the context...

Health literacy is increasingly recognized as a critical factor affecting the continuum of cancer care. According to European research, however, more than one third of the adult population may lack the necessary health literacy to manage their health. Conversely, the lack of capacity may limit their understanding of cancer screening and symptoms of...

In this chapter, we contribute to the expanding knowledge on health literacy in developing countries by presenting rare data from Afghanistan. We conducted a cross-sectional study with multi-stage random sampling of (literate and illiterate) male heads of the household (N = 502) in four districts in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. The questionnaire i...

Objective: Disaster health literacy is vital for emergency medicine and public health preparedness. Conversely, how health and safety information is communicated has a significant impact on disaster health literacy. A lack of alignment between the disaster response and the public's reaction was apparent during a Dutch chemical incident. This case...

Das Forschungsfeld Health Literacy befindet sich in stetigem Wandel. Es vereint unterschiedliche, teils widersprüchliche Zugänge und Perspektiven und bringt Akteur*innen aus diversen Fachdisziplinen zusammen, die verschiedenste Absichten verfolgen. Zu nennen sind hier beispielhaft Professionelle im medizinischen Kontext, die an einer effizienteren...

Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über Definitionen und Konzepte von Health Literacy und beschreibt ihre Entwicklung. Zunächst wird der Begriff Health Literacy mit Hinblick auf seine Bestandteile betrachtet – Health und Literacy – woraufhin Health Literacy als Ganzes definiert wird. Es werden verschiedene Definitionen vorgestellt und mit Hinblick...

Background Health literacy (HL) as an enabler of health equity and health promotion. HL is closely linked to other social determinants of health such as age, sex, education, social status and ethnicity. HL responsiveness is the degree to which systems or organizations make it easier for people to navigate, understand, and use information and servic...

Background The 53 Member States of the WHO European Region adopted in 2019 a health literacy roadmap and a resolution to develop an action plan to guide the work of the Member States. The development of the action plan builds on achievements regarding the EU funded European Health Literacy Survey and the WHO action networks on health literacy measu...

Background Understanding and utilizing health information has become increasingly demanding whereby people's health literacy becomes important. European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q16) measures health literacy (HL). We aimed to study the psychometric properties of the Danish version in the general population and a population with...

Background Addressing children`s and adolescents` health literacy is a bedrock for personal and societal growth, health and wellbeing over the life-course, and sustainable development in the WHO European Region and beyond. Promoting health literacy competencies should already be addressed in schools. To outline a strategy for the national education...

Background There is an on-going and a well observable uptake of health literacy in the national and international agenda-setting pertaining to the development of new policy strategies to address the issue of promoting health literacy in whole societies. Therefore, the aim of this research is to analyse those policies on how they address children an...

Background The HLS-EU study in 2011 demonstrated for 8 EU Member States that there exists limited comprehensive health literacy for considerable proportions of the general population, that there is a social gradient for health literacy and that limited health literacy has problematic consequences for healthy lifestyles, self-reported health and uti...

Background Grounded in the last decade's health literacy developments; the work of the European health literacy action networks on measurement and NCDs as well as the newly adopted European Health Literacy Roadmap and resolution agreed upon by their 53 Member States in 2019, the WHO European Region continues its investment in health literacy. A WHO...

This report focuses on the development of health literacy in two European countries, Denmark and the Netherlands. Denmark is part of the Nordic region, while the Netherlands is situated in the Western part of Europe. The report includes examples on Danish and Dutch health literacy research and lessons learned from practice. In Denmark, supported by...

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic causes fear, as its immediate consequences for the public have produced unprecedented challenges for the education and healthcare systems. We aimed to validate the fear of COVID-19 scale (FCoV-19S) and examine the association of its scores with health literacy and health-related behaviors among medic...

Healthcare translation provides a useful and powerful intervention tool to facilitate the engagement with migrants with diverse language, cultural, and health literacy backgrounds. The development of culturally effective and patient-oriented healthcare translation resources has become increasingly pressing. In this chapter, the authors explore, fir...

Background: Health literacy concerns the ability of citizens to meet the complex demands of health in modern society. Data on the distribution of health literacy in general populations and how health literacy impacts health behavior and general health remains scarce. The present study aims to investigate the prevalence of health literacy levels an...

A concept note on health literacy of children and adolescents.

Objective We aimed to develop a health literacy battery for three phases of stroke (HL-3S). Methods Three Rasch-based item banks corresponding to health care, disability prevention, and health promotion in the acute, subacute, and chronic phases of stroke, respectively, were developed by a multidisciplinary stroke team. To construct the HL-3S, a p...

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is spreading across the world. For those who catch it, the vast majority will experience mild symptoms, but for a few it can cause severe disease and death. Some groups-like older people and those with pre-existing health conditions-are more vulnerable when exposed than others. Because of this, the primary objecti...

The increased attention to the importance of health literacy for quality of life, health care, disease prevention, and health promotion has led to a growth in the global health literacy community. Health literacy plays an essential role in accelerating sustainable development. Recognizing that health literacy is two-sided-focusing on both the indiv...

According to WHO, today's disease-centred, reaction-based health services are not fit for the challenges of the 21st century. In contrast, health systems oriented around the needs of people and communities are more effective, cost less, improve health literacy and patient engagement, and are better prepared to respond to health crises. This paper d...

Background There is an on-going and a well observable uptake of health literacy in the national and international agenda setting pertaining the development of new policy strategies to address the issue of promoting health literacy in whole societies. Even though children have been declared to be a priority target, no research is available that has...

Digital technologies shape the way in which individuals and health systems interact to promote health and treat illness. Their propensity to exacerbate inequalities is increasingly being highlighted as a concern for public health. Personal, contextual and technological factors all interact and determine uptake and consequent use of digital technolo...

Abstract Although health literacy has long been a focus of attention in the WHO European Region, survey evidence in 2011 of eight Member States indicated that more than 47% of the adult population had suboptimal personal health literacy. Initiatives to prioritize health literacy in public policies include the WHO Shanghai Declaration, Health 2020,...

Background: Samoa is suffering from alarming rates of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). To address this epidemic, tackling health literacy is important. A qualitative study was conducted with the aim to explore health literacy in Samoa in relation to NCDs. Methods: Six focus groups were conducted, with a total sample size of 73 participants aged...

Background: A patient's health literacy is fundamental for navigating the health system and managing disease. This study aimed to compare the health literacy levels of patients with chronic retinal disease in Denmark. Methods: This cross-sectional questionnaire study used the validated HLS-EU-Q16 questionnaire to determine the health literacy of...

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC license. Health literacy addresses a range of social dimensions of health including knowledge, navigation, communication as well as individual and organizational skills for accessing, understanding, evaluating and using of information. Especially over the past decade, health literacy has become a major public he...

Background: No comprehensive short-form health literacy (HL) survey tool has been available for general use across Asia. Objective: This study aimed to develop and validate a short-form HL instrument derived from the 47-item European Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q47). Methods: A population survey (N = 10,024) was conducted from 2013 to...

As a multi-faceted concept, health literacy concerns the capacities of people to meet the complex demands of health in a modern society, starting with basic skills and ending with active citizenship. The importance of advancing health literacy in Europe was recognised by the European Commission in various communications and initiatives and most rec...

Limited health literacy is a neglected public health challenge in many countries. To bridge the gap, various interest groups, coalitions and networks have increasingly been formed. This study aimed to scope the formation of health literacy groups, coalitions and networks to map their existence and to discuss whether an actual global health literacy...