NCD health literacy--what can hospitals do?

Noncommunicable disease (NCD) health literacy is a person's ability to access, understand and use information to prevent, treat and manage chronic illness. Poor health literacy is shown to be associated with riskier behaviour, poor health choices and poorer health. Hospitals can play an important role in enhancing people's NCD health literacy all the way along a patient's "NCD journey" from prevention to management by aligning their communications to the health literacy capacities of their users. The authors suggest training providers to communicate more effectively with patients, making their systems easier to navigate, simplifying written materials, incorporating the use of technology and mobile-health, and using individual and system level scorecards and checklists.