Numeracy and COVID-19: examining interrelationships between numeracy, health numeracy and behaviour

Health literacy: a new challenge for laboratory medicine

Poor health literacy and inappropriate test prescribing hamper the value of laboratory medicine. The disintermediation between test producers and interpreters may happen both in Point of Care Tests, where doctor mediation is provided, but laboratory expert supervision is not, and in Direct to Consumer Testing, where no medical mediation is provided at all. In these cases, the respect for patient's autonomy must not preclude the principles of non-maleficence (as an individual concern) and justice (as a societal concern), as wrong test interpretation can generate confusion, anxiety, inappropriate social behavior, useless medical examinations and considerable cost increase. Considering how different is patient ability to understand test results (if any) and handle any physical and psychological consequence, promoting health literacy and professional laboratory mediation become crucial professional priorities. The aims of this review are 1) to describe the importance of health literacy on laboratory test interpretation, medical advice and therapeutic compliance; 2) to discuss doctor-level, patient-level and caregiver-level educational interventions in light of the four principles of the value-based framework (personal value, technical value, allocative value and societal value). Based on these premises, the authors support the need to enhance health literacy in patients, help doctors improve the communication of results and validate commercial tests under the scrutiny of scientific community.

When Positive is Negative: Health Literacy Barriers to Patient Access to Clinical Laboratory Test Results

BACKGROUND

Health literacy is a multidimensional set of skills (e.g., narrative, numeracy, digital, medication) that patients need to access and understand health information timely and accurately to make evidence-based informed decisions.

CONTENT

Multiple barriers prevent patients from effectively interacting with health information. The most salient barriers are poor overall health literacy skills and linguistic proficiency in English. As patients prefer direct access to laboratory test results, especially those of routine tests, contextualization and provider-directed interpretation of results are required to foster shared decision-making to address their healthcare issues and improve health outcomes.

SUMMARY

The use of systematic approaches that account for poor health literacy skills and include culturally and linguistically appropriate planning and availability of resources is warranted at individual and population health levels (e.g., human-centered design of patient portals).

Is Health Literacy Associated With Surgical Outcomes? A Systematic Review

INTRODUCTION

Low levels of health literacy have been shown to increase healthcare utilization and negatively affect health outcomes within medical specialties. However, the relationship of health literacy with clinical, patient-centered, and process-oriented surgical outcomes is not as well understood.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

We sought to systematically review the current evidence base regarding the relationship between health literacy and a range of outcomes in patients experiencing surgical care. Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, we searched six databases and then identified and extracted data from 25 cross-sectional or cohort studies deemed eligible for a systematic review.

RESULTS

Among included studies, strong evidence exists to support an association between low health literacy and worse patient-centered outcomes, as well as an association between low health literacy and poorer process-oriented surgical outcomes. However, the relationship between health literacy and clinical outcomes remains unclear.

CONCLUSIONS

Substantial opportunities remain to improve our understanding of the impact of health literacy on surgical outcomes. Future work should expand the range of institutional and specialized surgical settings studied, implement a standardized set of validated health literacy assessment tools, include more diverse patient populations, and investigate a comprehensive range of patient-reported outcomes.

Task features change the relation between math anxiety and number line estimation performance with rational numbers: Two large-scale online studies

Math performance is negatively related to math anxiety (MA), though MA may impact certain math skills more than others. We investigated whether the relation between MA and math performance is affected by task features, such as number type (e.g., fractions, whole numbers, percentages), number format (symbolic vs. nonsymbolic), and ratio component size (small vs. large). Across two large-scale studies (combined n = 3,822), the MA-performance relation was strongest for large whole numbers and fractions, and stronger for symbolic than nonsymbolic fractions. The MA-performance relation was also stronger for smaller relative to larger components, and MA relating to specific number types may be a better predictor of performance than general MA for certain tasks. The relation between MA and estimation performance changes depending on task features, which suggests that MA may relate to certain math skills more than others, which may have implications for how people reason with numerical information and may inform future interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).