Health Literacy And Health Decision-Making

Maintaining individual health requires making appropriate health care decisions and is determined by one’s ability to access, comprehend, and successfully process said information; this is known as health literacy (Altin, Finke, Kautz-Freimuth, & Stock, 2014). Existing literature documents the importance of health literacy and the impact it has on obtaining adequate knowledge about health and medical issues, in turn impacting the health care decision-making process (Aboumatar, Carson, Beach, Roter, & Cooper, 2013). Research demonstrates that low health literacy minimizes an individual’s capacity to understand the causes and nature of illness, increases the likelihood of engaging in risky health behaviors, increases the likelihood of being