Health Literacy In Occupational Therapy

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According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, conducted in 2003 by the United States Department of Education, over 75 million people in the United States had basic or below basic health literacy (Institute of Education Sciences, 2006). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2016), defined health literacy as the ability to understand, gain access to, and use health related information to maintain and promote good health. Low health literacy affects all types of people, however, racial and ethnic minorities and older adults seem to be the two groups most susceptible (Cutilli & Bennett, 2009). For older adults, low health literacy is a concern due to the prevalence of chronic disease and the need for self management abilities …show more content…
This statement enforces that occupational therapists should not only meet the health literacy standards set forth by law, but should work to promote and increase health literacy as well. Levasseur and Carrier (2012) identified six ways that health literacy could be incorporated into occupational therapy, with one being collaboration to promote health literacy. There are community based programs that have been shown to increase both health literacy and self management for chronic illnesses. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how health care providers, specifically occupational therapists, are collaborating with the community and creating community partnerships to gain access to these programs and services for their clients (Muscat et al., …show more content…
This model focuses on person factors, environment factors, and occupations (Christiansen, Baum, & Bass, 2015), and can be used by therapist to “identify clients’ resources and barriers to occupational performance” (Christiansen et al., 2015). The model can be used and applied to groups, organizations, individuals, and whole populations. In this study varying aspects that relate to the PEOP can be found. One aspect discussed in the PEOP model that pertains to this study is the concept of collaboration. The PEOP model is focused around a collaborative relationship that involves the client, stating the client should be actively involved in his or her own intervention because only the client can best identify what is most valuable in their lives (Christiansen et al., 2015). The collaborative partnership focused on in this study, is designed to give clients the resources needed to allow them to make an educated decision about whether the community based program would benefit them individually. The PEOP also focuses on one’s environment and whether it enables or impedes performance (Christiansen et al., 2015; Wong & Fisher, 2018). In addition, the PEOP model emphasizes that to achieve occupational participation, competence in occupational performance is required (Wong & Fisher, 2015).The partnership that is in place has established an unique environment that provides