NAHSL: News

Barbara Slover: The Importance of Health Literacy

Reflections on the NAHSL Annual Meeting by NAHSL Annual Meeting Scholarship Winner Barbara Slover

The Importance of Health Literacy

I was so excited and grateful to attend the Turning the Tide, the NAHSL 2022 conference. While all the sessions were interesting, I will focus my discussion on one of the break-out sessions on Monday. This session was titled: Science, Literacy & the COVID Pandemic and sponsored by MAHSLIN. 

Three speakers shared their perspectives on how scientific literacy and health literacy were exposed as a missing element that needed to be strengthened in a variety of communities during the COVID pandemic. Jeni Stolow, PhD, MPH joined us remotely and has a background in medical anthropology, public health, and infectious disease outbreak response. Dr. Stolow discussed how the COVID pandemic exposed society’s limited trust in science and the difficulties the public has to sort through the science to understand what is out there. She also discussed how the public saw the evolving information in the COVID pandemic and most individuals were not aware of or comfortable with the change in scientific knowledge and change in recommendations to the public. She reminded the audience of that inequity in access to information can limit trust in science too.

The next speaker, Jennifer Hayman, MD, is collaborating with a team to “Develop a Novel Interprofessional Tool for Addressing Health Misinformation.” Dr. Hayman is a pediatrician, who also educates medical students and residents at MaineHealth. Her group is expanding the definition of interprofessional and has done focus groups to learn more about this topic. They are exploring why individuals may have personal or professional concerns about COVID information and basically do not trust science. They want to develop a tool kit of asynchronous interactive learning to improve health professionals’ capacity to confront misinformation, such as may be shared at a medical visit or by a health colleague. Some findings thus far include: individualism vs. collectivism, body autonomy, constantly changing COVID recommendations, variety of information sources, fear/mistrust of new intervention, lack of provider preparedness for difficult conversations, judgmental language, history of racism & bias, and mistrust of science/government. 

The third speaker was Lucy Liaw, PhD who is a biomedical researcher and professor at MaineHealth. Dr. Liaw spoke about the National Postdoc Association’s core competencies and the one that programs spend the least amount of time on is Communication Skills. Unfortunately, this gap in scientists being able to share their research with the public at all education levels was exposed in the COVID pandemic and contributed to some of the lack of trust in science and the process. The traditional way that science reports their findings (details, background, and then the point of the research/what was found out) is different than the way the public prefers to hear information (most essential information/what was found out and then details and background about how it was done, why important, etc.). NIH has recognized this gap and is encouraging new efforts in training postdocs in communication skills. 

The audience asked questions around how medical librarians, who are still seen as a trusted community resource, can help build public trust in science and improve health literacy. One suggestion was to find the “micro-motivations” that would encourage individuals to trust the science, such as an individual may want to participate in a community event (Mardi Gras in New Orleans) and this would motivate them to listen to and consider the medical and scientific information you share with them, where the idea of “protect the whole community” may not really motivate the individual. We can build community and direct individuals to high quality information sources to answer their questions. It may take many exposures to encourage some individuals to begin to trust science and improve their health literacy, but it is an important challenge for us to meet. In addition to working in a medical library, I plan to use my new knowledge to educate friends and family, and the wider community, on reputable and easy to understand medical and scientific education sources. With the speed of information and scientific changes, health literacy is an ongoing necessity for everyone. 

Barbara Slover, MPH, CNP (Certified Nonprofit Professional)