Measuring health professionals' capability to respond to health consumers' health literacy needs: a scoping review.

Abstract

Health literacy-responsive health professionals will be increasingly important in addressing healthcare access and equity issues. This international scoping review aims to understand the extent and ways in which health professionals respond to healthcare users' health literacy, identifying tools used to measure health literacy responsiveness and training to support the development of these attributes. Four online databases were searched. Using Covidence software and pre-determined inclusion/exclusion criteria, all articles were screened by two authors. Data were extracted using a researcher-developed data extraction tool. From the 1531 studies located, 656 were screened at title and abstract and 137 were assessed at full text; 68 studies met the inclusion criteria and 61 were identified through hand searching resulting in 129 papers in total. Five overlapping thematic elements describing thirty attributes of health literacy responsive health professionals were identified: (i) communication, (ii) literacies, (iii) andragogy, (iv) social/relational attributes and (v) responding to diversity. Other concepts of 'tailoring' and 'patient-centred care' that cut across multiple themes were reported. Forty-four tools were identified that assessed some aspects of health literacy responsiveness. Thirty of the tools reported were custom tools designed to test an intervention, and 14 tools were specifically employed to assess health literacy responsiveness as a general concept. Seventy studies described education and training for health professionals or students. This scoping review provides a contemporary list of key attributes required for health literacy-responsive health professionals, which may serve as a foundation for future health literacy research including the development of curricula in health professional education and tools to measure health professional health literacy responsiveness.