Dr. Eugene L. Anderson, Associate Executive Director and Director, ADEA Center for Educational Policy and Research
Oral Health Literacy
The most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that 36% of American adults lack sufficient health literacy skills to perform common tasks, such as using a prescription drug label to time medication in relationship to meals or using a height and weight graph to determine a healthy weight range. The implications of these findings are nothing short of alarming, and they speak to the urgent need to train health professions students in how to communicate more effectively with their patients.
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Integrating Health Literacy in Dental Education
Dushanka V. Kleinman, D.D.S., M.Sc.D., Associate Dean for Research and Academic Affairs at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and former Chief Dental Officer of the U.S. Public Health Service
Upon first hearing the phrase “health literacy” years ago, I thought I understood its meaning. The words were not intimidating. They lent themselves to immediate interpretation based on my personal experiences as both a consumer and a health professional. With my initial impression of familiarity, I wondered why there was such a focus on health literacy. Was this focus a strategy to revitalize health education, an essential core of public and professional health care services that had been lost? Was this focus a strategy to empower patients, clients, and the public at a time of increasing health care volume and often conflicting messages about health promotion and disease prevention? Was this focus a strategy to reinvent our complex health delivery systems?
Well, time has passed, and I now realize how naive I was.
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