An increasingly popular strategy to lessen health inequalities is to increase health literacy. However, are we relying too much on an idea that is growing too general to be effective?

Fundamentally, health literacy refers to the abilities that allow people to receive, comprehend, evaluate, and use information in order to make choices and take activities that will affect their health. The importance of personal skills is emphasised in health literacy. These abilities can be used in a medical setting during a doctor’s visit or in a social setting while making choices regarding one’s health and welfare.

Health literacy has attracted increasing academic, policy, and practitioner interest over the past 20 years as a means of enhancing health outcomes, which has resulted in:

• a growing body of data that includes health literacy measurement techniques and paradigms for enhancing individual, organisational, and system health literacy.
• The National Safety and Quality Health Services Standards’ inclusion of health literacy.
• The creation of a health literacy workforce in local health districts and primary care.

This increase is extensive yet has been encouraging. Health literacy could end up being used for everything. Health literacy has been used as a tool to help solve a variety of complicated issues, including patient involvement, patient safety, quality of treatment, integrated care, access to health care, self-management, and shared decision making. There are many definitions of health literacy. Although it is a positive, the widespread application of health literacy to admirable ideas like patient-centered care has some drawbacks as well. It can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

I therefore discuss how improving health literacy can lessen health disparities with some trepidation. Despite their differences, these ideas are connected. Marginalized groups, especially those from low socioeconomic areas and populations with a variety of cultures and languages, are disproportionately affected by low health literacy. In other words, those who are negatively impacted by their living and working environments are more likely to have poor health literacy. These populations would still experience health inequities as a result of the conditions in which they live and work, even if we were to overcome the barriers to health literacy.

The health sector is responsible for addressing health literacy. As opposed to addressing other health determinants like housing and poverty, which are everyone’s responsibility but fall under the purview of other sectors, improving the health literacy of the healthcare system may be more adaptable. But frequently, the design of health systems and services presume that the general public has a high level of health literacy. Inadvertently requiring high health literacy, health services and systems unfairly disenfranchise persons with low health literacy from receiving medical care.

One of the factors that contribute to health inequalities may be addressed by the health care system in a concrete way through the delivery of effective health literacy treatments. Future health literacy initiatives should concentrate on enhancing health communication to reach a variety of populations, particularly by enhancing frontline professionals’ skills and resources; assisting citizens in developing transferable skills in accessing, understanding, and applying health information; and ensuring that priorities are arranged in a manner that is proportionate to need by involving population groups who are disproportionally affected by health conditions. To ascertain whether these initiatives are having the desired societal impact, they must be analysed.

The provision of efficient health literacy interventions will enhance patient and provider communication, access to healthcare, and patient self-management for underprivileged patients. Although this is a promising investment, it is not a magic bullet for tackling the deeper causes of health inequalities.