Health literacy data

Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions, and is a major issue for health care services. 

In the UK 43% of adults struggle to understand written health related information and this rises to 61% when numeric information is included (Rowlands, 2015).

Health Education England, along with the University of Southampton have created an online tool that provides estimates of low health literacy, which can be viewed at the level of local authorities. 

The tool can further be combined with low health numeracy to give an overall picture of the challenges in producing accessible health information for the local population.

As well as searching by area, the site has a clickable map that allows you to explore the data visually.

You can find the online tool here http://healthliteracy.geodata.uk/