The authors argue that while the influence of many socio-economic factors on health is increasingly well documented, much less is known about literacy skills and practices as well as patterns of information acquisition among those in the population with higher health risks. As well, they ask how these relationships vary through different stages of the life cycle.
They also seek to understand why these relationships are important suggesting that low literacy skills and related practices may serve as barriers to the attainment of good health care practices and healthy lifestyle decisions. This leads them to consider why literacy can therefore be considered an important policy issue for health promotion concluding that enhancing literacy can help to achieve health promotion goals. They also suggest that understanding literacy practices and patterns is the first step towards more effectively sending health messages to target populations.
Traditionally research on health has been concerned with obvious health variables such as genetics, biomedical factors, lifestyle patterns, risk behaviours and the quality of health care. While the importance of that research is undeniable, it has become increasingly evident that the health of a population is also strongly linked to social and economic variables.
This report examines the literature on factors influencing health such as marital status, age, sex, immigration, home ownership, occupational and labour force status, income and education. While the complex interaction of these factors is not yet fully understood the evidence suggests that the link between these variables and health appears to vary through the life cycle. This review examines a number of these factors as they relate to seniors, in particular the impact of literacy skills on health and the adequacy of the literacy skills of the Canadian seniors population.