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Health Literacy: Cultural influence, challenges, impact of different populations, and global perspectives.

Being educated or literate comes at a cost but being illiterate comes at a greater cost. Illiteracy has become an increasingly important problem across the globe, especially as it relates to healthcare. Andrus and Roth (2002) confirmed that a national survey found that almost half the adult population in America had deficiencies in reading or computation skills. From a global perspective, The WHO links health literacy initiatives to improved global literacy, which is one of the organization's international sustainable development goals (Levin-Zamir et al., 2017).

Culture, as it influences health literacy, is a totally different thing entirely. Patients need to understand whatever the health practitioner has told them and understanding your ailment helps to determine how to follow up on treatment options. Cultural and language differences and socioeconomic status interact with and contribute to low health literacy, it is also defined as the inability to understand, or act on medical/therapeutic instructions (Shaw et al., 2008). The influence of culture on health literacy in administering healthcare presents its own challenges as well. Healthcare practitioners are presented with unique challenges, especially in the field of primary healthcare which calls for the tailoring of care to the specific needs and beliefs of diverse cultural groups (Shaw et al., 2008). For instance, in the USA, immigrants encounter many challenges upon their arrival into the country, one of the challenges is communication with health authorities. Inability to read and understand an invitation for health screening and not knowing what exactly is on the invitation. These language barriers negatively affect communication between immigrants and healthcare professionals, reducing the accuracy and willingness of symptom reporting (Bischoff et al., 2003).

The impact health literacy/illiteracy has on various cultures, beliefs practices, and traditions can be highlighted in the following as acknowledged by Shaw et al. (2008) where they posited for example in the Mexican American community, they have a combination of various herbs which they use to treat ailments or the case of African American mothers relying on steam inhalation, herbal teas and homemade syrups.

Initiatives are being presented from different case studies that have been conducted which will aim to improve health literacy. According to Levin-Zamir et al. (2017), these initiatives should be directed to the individual and to the families and those influencing the individual, the community, the general population, healthcare professionals, and policymakers to increase awareness of health literacy. These will ultimately help in the promotion of the understanding of health literacy as an issue for the community, promoting access of culturally appropriate health-related information which will be presented in ways that have been developed through public participation to be used in various life situations and with different educational, ethnic or social background.