About
Canlib – Background
Health literacy

Limited health literacy often means that a person is unable to manage their own and family health health effectively, access health services effectively, and understand the information given to them to make informed healthy decisions. Improving health literacy of those with the worst health outcomes would be an important strategy to reduce health inequalities

Empowering people to understand simple health information enables patients to make crucial decisions. Patient groups say raising health literacy will help empower patients and help reduce inequalities across the EU adult literacy rates tend to be higher in northern Europe than in southern and eastern states.

“Member states spend between 10% and 15% of their budget on health care. However, even in times of financial austerity, I would hope health literacy funding is something that will not be cut because it helps ensure resources are used efficiently by empowered citizens,” (Mr Gallagher, MEP., Ireland).

Poor Health Literacy is a huge burden on societies, both medically and economically. “It is estimated that low ability to understand health information costs the U.S. government $73 billion annually (American Medical Association press release, “Hidden problem named as national health priority”, 9 January 2003); however, no precise figures are available for Europe.

While accurate EU figures are not available, a comparison using population size to find a cost per citizen of $237.78 indicates there could be a potential saving to the EU in the region of $237,958.000,000 per annum or €179,491,719,400.*

“This lack of information could mean that Europe is spending millions in the healthcare sector that could easily be prevented with improved Health Literacy”, Ilona Kickbusch.

A new paradigm

To help achieve a higher level of health literacy,as well as examining the potential to identify higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness, a number of parallel actions will be completed that will contribute to the development of a public information model on Cancer information. This model will be called “Canlib”.

To complete the cancer information model the following 6 actions will be developed.

1) Researching the information needs of all communities
involved in the information dissemination processes including:

– Government activities at its various levels
– Agencies committed to promoting information and understanding of Cancer
– Professional groups involved in cancer treatment and care
– Local community activists interested in promoting health and
accessing the needs of the marginalised in their communities.

2) Developing new information management models that will improve production, dissemination, promotion while reducing administrative overheads and reducing costs.

3) Increasing information dissemination across the EU, while identifying methods to reduce the associated costs

4) Improving the uptake of direct actions promoting information actions by developing development models.

5) Increasing the visibility of the project work and outcomes to a wide audience of citizens across the EU.

6) Build on positive previous experiences of information actions in this area by meeting the needs of a wider range of EU citizens.

* We have used the calculators from Measuringworth.com to assist us in arriving at the above estimated cost.

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