Health literacy in non-communicable diseases: Contexts and cases

The chapter highlights some of the methods used to embed health literacy principles into patient outreach and education materials about non-communicable diseases: chronic conditions including mental health conditions. A person 's or population 's understanding and engagement with health represents its health literacy. Health literacy is a form social capital. The authors use an ecological, socially con-textualized model of health literacy and demonstrate how it guides the structure and content of health education material in case examples from New York City, United States, and Greece in Europe. While the specific methods used in these cases vary, the essential principal is that it is critical to identify and build on information about an individual's health literacy contextualized in the individual's or group's socio-cultural and lived experiences. Only this way can an individual's or group's health literacy be advanced so that they can engage in behavior changes for both short- and long-term health outcomes.