What does the study conclude?

This report demonstrates that the socio-economic environment remains an important determinant of health and it explores the effects of literacy skill levels on population health. It found:

• People with lower literacy levels are more likely to be at highest health risk, with an increased effect on senior citizens. This relationship tends to occur for all age groups and both sexes.
• A large number of low-literacy senior citizens, who have a relatively higher health risk, require assistance to complete a number of everyday tasks, such as reading government information and filling out forms. Access to social assistance, health care information and a variety of other health-related programs is directly connected to literacy ability.
• Higher-literacy seniors were more likely to obtain information from a wider selection of sources than their lower-literacy counterparts. While television was a major source of knowledge of current events, those with higher-literacy were more likely than those with lower literacy to use newspapers and magazines as additional sources of information.
• A large number of senior citizens overestimated their literacy abilities. Those with the lowest-measured literacy abilities, whether prose, document or quantitative, were much more likely to have overestimated their literacy abilities than those with higher literacy scores.
• Possible dangers to the health of these seniors were observed in the large numbers of low literacy seniors who needed to take medicine daily and presumably to read and understand medicine bottle instructions and prescriptions.