The Level of Health Literacy Knowledge among Nurse Faculty Teaching in Nursing Programs in the US

Background: Ninety million Americans have low health literacy making it difficult to understand health information, read medication labels, or find their way to healthcare facilities. Patients with low health literacy are at... [ view full abstract ]

Background: Ninety million Americans have low health literacy making it difficult to understand health information, read medication labels, or find their way to healthcare facilities. Patients with low health literacy are at risk for adverse events; increased hospital admissions and readmissions, fatal errors and mortality. Nursing professionals’ health literacy knowledge and its importance in promoting positive health outcomes is limited. It has not been formally addressed in nursing schools and curricula standards are almost non-existent. Health literacy knowledge deficits among nursing faculty make it difficult to incorporate health literacy strategies into nursing education programs.
Purpose: To identify the health literacy knowledge among nursing faculty who teach in nursing programs throughout the U.S.
Design: Cross-sectional, descriptive study
Setting: A US Nationwide Nursing Education Summit
Sample: Convenience sample of 224 nursing faculty
Procedure: Data collected using The Health Literacy Knowledge and Experiences Part 1 Survey.
Results: Response rate was 54%. Respondents were White (91%), female (97%) with a mean age of 54 years. 96% had either doctoral or master’s degrees.
The mean health literacy score was 22 (out of 29). No significant relationship between health literacy scores and including health literacy in the curriculum (p=0.29). 27.5% did not identify any barriers to implementing health literacy into nursing curricula, while 18.5% stated that health literacy was already included. The most significant implementation barriers identified were lack of health literacy knowledge among faculty who develop nursing curricula (42%), the existence of health literacy curricula are lacking (25%) and health literacy is a low priority as compared to other mandated areas in nursing programs (21%).
Conclusions: Although heath literacy levels were high in this group there is evidence that there are significant barriers to implementing heath literacy content into nursing curricula. Health literacy content and innovative strategies need to be developed to reduce these barriers.