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Health Literacy In Health Care

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Health Literacy In Health Care
It is important that health care providers have great health literacy to communicate with other health care providers. While patients are less likely to have the education and qualifications to be able to understand health literacy. 90 million Americans have limited English and math skills enabling them to use the health care system (IOM, 2007). This is a scary statistic because that is more than half of the general health population. Since these members of the community are unable to understand the health language they end up over dosing or taking the wrong medication, and in result have to go to the hospital or the emergency room. It is not only difficult to understand health literacy on prescriptions, hospital signs but food labels as well.

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