According to a recent study, more than half of the people in Germany (around 54 percent) only have “limited health literacy”. This means they have difficulty finding health-related information, evaluating it and making the right decisions about healthy living or managing illness. This applies in particular to older people, people with chronic illnesses, people with a low level of education and people with a migration background. Better health literacy pays off for the individual, but also for the community: according to WHO estimates, three to five percent of health expenditure is caused by insufficient health literacy. For Germany alone, this means around 9 to 15 billion euros.
Initiated by Federal Health Minister Hermann Gröhe, the partners in the “Alliance for Health Competence” made a joint declaration to develop and implement measures to improve health knowledge in their respective areas of responsibility. The most important fields of action are the improvement of health education, good health information and decision-making aids, especially on the Internet, as well as more comprehensibility in doctor-patient discussions, but also in all other health professions.
The Federal Ministry of Health commissioned the Institute for Quality and Efficiency to develop a concept for a national health portal by 2018. The portal aims to bring together trustworthy, scientifically proven and independent health information. In order to improve the doctor-patient dialogue, the Federal Ministry of Health has funded the development of a model curriculum “Communication in Medicine” as part of the National Cancer Plan, which teaches students throughout their medical studies skills to explain knowledge about diagnosis and therapy in a comprehensible way, to respond to the questions of the patient and his relatives and to accompany them in the therapy. A corresponding model curriculum for nursing is currently being developed.
The partners of the “Alliance for Health Literacy” are:
- Federal Ministry of Health
- Conference of Health Ministers of the Federal States
- The Federal Government Commissioner for the interests of patients and the authorized representative for care
- German Medical Association
- Federal Dental Association
- Federal Union of German Associations of Pharmacists
- Federal working group SELF-HELP of people with disabilities, chronic diseases and their relatives eV
- German Hospital Society
- German Nursing Council eV
- Joint Federal Committee
- National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds
- National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians
- National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists
- Consumer Center Federal Association eV
- Association of Private Health Insurance eV