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Health Promotion International Advance Access originally published online on January 25, 2008
Health Promotion International 2008 23(2):152-159; doi:10.1093/heapro/dan001
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© 2008 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commerical use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

A tale of two health literacies: public health and clinical approaches to health literacy

Andrew Pleasant1,* and Shyama Kuruvilla2

1Department of Human Ecology and Extension Department of Family and Community Health Sciences, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 55 Dudley Road #207, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA 2Department of International Health, Boston University School of Public Health, Center for International Health and Development, Boston University, USA

* Corresponding author. E-mail: pleasant{at}aesop.rutgers.edu


  Abstract

Public health concerns underlie a considerable portion of the global burden of disease, increasing the utility and need for promoting and assessing the knowledge about public health issues. Health literacy is generally agreed upon as a means to find, understand, analyze and use information to make better decisions about health and to ultimately reduce inequities in health. A public health literacy knowledge scale was tested in China, Mexico, Ghana and India. A somewhat unexpected finding, which was that experts ‘scored’ less on the scale than the general public, led to consideration of differences between clinical and public health approaches to health literacy and their implications. These differences in perspective, for instance consideration of single case effects versus impacts at the societal level, pose significant challenges to developing and assessing health literacy. We suggest that a comprehensive approach to health literacy will include both clinical and public health approaches.

Key words: clinical information; facts for life; health literacy; public health; scale development


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