health and literacy

Preteen Girls With Low Literacy More Likely to Become Pregnant as Teens

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

A new study provides more evidence that investments in literacy pay off in ways that aren’t directly concerned with job training or career prep.

Released this week at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, a University of Pennsylvania study suggests that independent of other factors, preteen girls with below average literacy are more likely to get pregnant as teenagers.

The researchers examined the reading scores of 12,339 girls with an average age of about 12 years, together with the birth records among those girls from 1996 to 2002. Girls who had below-average reading skills were 2.5 times more likely to have a child in their teen years than those with average reading skills.

Healthline reported some interesting comments made by the researchers during their presentation:

“This study underscores the importance of investing early in programs to improve literacy across the board, said Dr. Rosemary Frasso, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania and APHA presenter, in an interview with Healthline. “The potential reduction in teenage childbearing is one of the many positive payoffs here.”

Frasso points out that because African American and Latina girls were found to have lower literacy levels, literacy programs may particularly help prevent unwanted teenage pregnancies in those groups. “Education success and better literacy in young children is protective for preventing teenage childbearing, particularly for Latina and African American girls.” (my emphasis)

Frasso went on to say that  increasing collaboration between educators and healthcare providers would be “a good idea.” Specifically, according to the Healthline post, doctors should help preteen patients connect with literacy programs.

There’s more about this research from Science Daily and Public Health Newswire. The study itself is scheduled to be published in the February 2013 issue of Contraception.

This research illustrates the why, from a public policy perspective, it is a mistake to link investments in literacy for youth and adults so rigidly to job skill outcomes. This could lead to a narrowing of the public’s perception of the role that literacy has on other critical social issues, such as health, nutrition, pre-natal care, safety, and community engagement (just to name a few)—and limit opportunities for literacy programs to collaborate on efforts to address them. It’s critically important that public officials, foundations, and other private funders are shown how investments in literacy can positively impact their efforts to address a wide variety of issues.

Question of the Day: Low Literacy and Medicine Bottles

/ The Old Crank

During the last week of May, WBEZ’s radio series Front & Center began airing a series about low literacy in the Great Lakes region. In an article on their Web site that accompanies the series, they run through a bulleted list of facts on the impact of low literacy. One of those bullets was: “Medication errors due to misread or misunderstood prescription labels cause up to 7,000 deaths each year.”

The inability to follow prescription instructions is a frequently used example to illustrate the challenges of low literacy. I’ve used it myself in material I’ve prepared for D.C. LEARNs and ProLiteracy. And it makes at least some logical sense. If prescription information is written at a level that is too difficult for people with low literacy to read, it’s not a stretch to assume that those people are more likely to make a mistake (and there is anecdotal evidence supporting this). But I wonder whether there is any hard data that actually shows how many people are directly harmed by people with low literacy misreading prescription labels.

The source for Front & Center‘s factoid above was derived from a 2005 American Medical Association publication that accompanied a White House Conference on Aging mini-conference on on health literacy and health disparities. Here is what that publication actually said:

All medications have the potential of causing harm as well as benefit, the incidence of adverse medication events increases with the number of medications. Medication errors are the most common medical mistakes – some as a result of misread or misunderstood prescription labels – causing up to 7,000 deaths each year and costing the health care system nearly $73 billion annually. Improving communications on medications can improve care, reduce errors, and save lives. (my emphasis)

The key word above is “some.” In other words, medication errors cause up to 7,ooo deaths annually, and the authors of this report think that some of those 7,000 are due to misread or misunderstood prescription labels. But even among that subset of the 7,000, it’s not stated how many misread or misunderstood prescription labels can be attributed to low literacy. Just because a label is misread or misunderstood, that doesn’t mean that low literacy was the cause. I have relatively high literacy and I misread things all the time.

I have passing familiarity with the literature on health literacy. I know there are studies on the relationship between low literacy and poor health, educational attainment and mortality rates, on the difficulties that people with low literacy have in understanding health information, or navigating the health care system, etc. What I’m specifically interested in is whether there is better data on the number of medication errors—and more importantly, the harm caused by those errors—that can clearly be attributed to low literacy adults misreading labels. Can anyone point me to a good source?