Pleasant Andrew, Kuruvilla Shyama
Department 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.
Health Promot Int. 2008 Jun;23(2):152-9. doi: 10.1093/heapro/dan001. Epub 2008 Jan 25.
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.
公共卫生问题构成了全球疾病负担的很大一部分，这增加了推广和评估有关公共卫生问题知识的实用性和必要性。健康素养通常被认为是一种手段，用于查找、理解、分析和使用信息，以便就健康问题做出更好的决策，并最终减少健康方面的不平等现象。一个公共卫生素养知识量表在中国、墨西哥、加纳和印度进行了测试。一个有些出人意料的发现是，专家在该量表上的得分低于普通公众，这引发了对健康素养的临床方法和公共卫生方法之间的差异及其影响的思考。这些观点上的差异，例如对单个病例影响与社会层面影响的考量，给健康素养的发展和评估带来了重大挑战。我们建议，健康素养的综合方法应包括临床方法和公共卫生方法。
