Health literacy in dentistry: an overview and toolkit

Health literacy is the ability of patients to understand, process and act upon information and services provided in order to make health-related decisions. Up to half of the population do not understand health-related information in its current format. The purpose of this article is to formulate a simple toolkit for use by the dental team that outlines reasonable adjustments that can be made to patient information to match the population's level of health literacy. This has benefits for the patient by improving dental health outcomes and for the dental team by obviating the economic and dento-legal implications of poor health literacy. CPD/Clinical Relevance: Patients’ health literacy is a strong predictor of their overall and oral health outcomes, therefore it is important that they understand written health information.