Health Literacy: Read All about It …

One of the key goals in the personalised medicine era is to improve communication between front-line healthcare professionals and their patients. The latter should have an equal role in any decisions made about their treatment, and this requires them to be able to input vital information, such as lifestyle and work circumstances, as well as to be properly informed from the other side. Discussions should be a two-way street. To help facilitate this, it is more important than ever to bring Europe together in a way that improves the already significant skills that healthcare professionals possess to permit co-decision-making which will effectively empower the patient. Clearly, the healthcare professional is trained to be an expert in diagnosing conditions and suggesting treatments. And yet the patient also knows more about his or her own lifestyle, work environment and how much he can rely on family-care resources, for example, so co-decision is a growing part of modern-day medicine. Ultimately, the two must work together to produce the optimal result.