Health literacy continuing education courses and tools for healthcare professionals: A scoping review

ABSTRACT

Strengthening the health literacy (HL) skills of the healthcare users is a multicomponent process involving the users, the healthcare professionals, the stakeholders, and the environment. Health organizations, universities, private initiatives, and funded projects focused on developing and implementing continuing education courses target at increasing healthcare professionals’ HL. This scoping review aimed at reporting the HL continuing education courses for healthcare professionals to enhance their knowledge and skills in identifying and supporting healthcare users with limited HL, and particularly, older people. This review followed the five stages by Arksey and O’Malley framework and the guidelines by Joanna Briggs Institute for scoping reviews. Peer-reviewed papers and gray literature published between years 2000 to 2020 were included in this bibliometric search utilizing four electronic databases (PUBMED, MEDLINE, CINAHL, PSYCHINFO, and Opengrey). Twenty-seven (27) papers met the criteria, including twenty-one (21) full-texts and six (6) other records (website contents, eLearning, and funded projects). There is a lack of HL tools that address the training needs of healthcare professionals working with older adults. Tailored HL tools could benefit healthcare professionals’ clinical work by improving their communication with older adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Training
• medical education
• health literacy
• healthcare professionals
• older adults
• scoping review

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank all the researchers who provided detailed information about their continuing education courses development and implementation during the selection phase.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors contributions

Conceptualization and methodology: Α.Ε. & Α.Κ.; Data collection: Α.Ε. & Α.Κ.; Formal analysis and investigation: Α.Ε., Α.Κ., Μ.Ρ. & B.K; Writing – original draft and Writing – Review & Editing: Α.Ε. & Α.Κ.; Supervision and project administration: Α.Ε.

Declaration statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The review was fully funded by the Hellenic Mediterranean University as part of a postdoctoral research fellowship of the first author.