Health system must genuinely speak to everyone, says health literacy expert

Internationally renowned health literacy expert Professor Don Nutbeam headlined the Healthdirect Australia Information Partner Forum on Friday 11 November 2016, where he spoke passionately about creating a genuinely accessible and usable health system.

Professor Nutbeam urged health industry professionals at the forum to think about reaching those members of the population who often get left behind.

“We have seen in Australia a continuous improvement in life expectancies – a genuine increase of the number of healthy years people live - but there has been absolutely no impact on social differences, much like in the UK,” Professor Nutbeam, a former Head of Public Health in the UK, told the forum.

He said that while life expectancy has gone up, the widening gap between the richest and poorest in Australia, access to education, employment and income are all contributing factors that affect health outcomes.

“The default position for almost everything we do in healthcare is to organise from the middle,” he said.

“That works well for most people but the problem is that those people who have already been left behind just get left further behind on the fringes.

“My mantra while working in the UK, and now, is that we have got to improve everybody’s health and we have got to improve the health of the poorest the fastest,” Professor Nutbeam said.

Health literacy is the ability to obtain, read, understand and use healthcare information to make appropriate health decisions and follow instructions for treatment. Low health literacy can affect people’s ability to do things like navigate the health system, understand medical instructions, and seek support from health professionals.

Most widely known for his health literacy model developed in the early 1990s, Professor Nutbeam says it’s really only in the last 10 years that the topic has gained traction, featuring as one of the top three most important issues at the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) 9^th Global Conference on Health Promotion in China this week.

Now Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney, Professor Nutbeam is keen to see a combined commitment from states and territories across Australia to respond to health literacy concerns.

“I’d like to see more national agents like Healthdirect Australia responding to the challenges that health literacy represents for the whole population,” he said.

Healthdirect Australia was established by the Council of Australian Governments with a mandate to work across jurisdictional boundaries to deliver telehealth and digital health services to all Australians. Two of its key priorities are to provide equity of access for all Australians to healthcare and to improve health literacy so that all Australians can manage their own health and wellbeing.

Now in its third year, the annual Partner Forum gives Healthdirect Australia’s 176 information partners the opportunity to come together to discuss current issues facing the Australian health system, with a particular focus on telehealth and digital health services and information.