Advancing health literacy: a global challenge for the 21st century

Abstract

The most recent United States health objectives for the nation, published in Healthy People 2010, contain for the first time an objective to improve health literacy. This objective forms part of an entirely new chapter on Health Communication in the report. The objective is very general— to improve the health literacy of persons with inadequate or marginal literacy skills—and it is presented as a ‘developmental’ objective on the basis that there is no established measure of health literacy which could be used to monitor progress in relation to this target (Department of Health and Human Services, 2000).