Q&A: Pharmacists at the Frontline of Health Literacy Challenges

Pharmacists interact daily with patients who often struggle with low health literacy, yet this role remains underrecognized. Many patients cannot fully understand treatment instructions due to medical jargon or complexity. With small but intentional steps, like teach-back methods, pharmacists can bridge gaps, ensuring patients leave with clear, actionable knowledge.

Q&A: Pharmacists at the Frontline of Health Literacy Challenges / terovesalainen - stock.adobe.com

Drug Topics® recently sat down with Amy Howard, MS, PharmD, clinical assistant professor at the University of Maryland, and Laura Sahm, PhD, professor of clinical pharmacy at University College Cork, to discuss why health literacy is such a critical but often overlooked aspect of patient care, especially in pharmacy.

Drug Topics: Why is health literacy such a critical but often overlooked aspect of patient care, especially in pharmacy?

Amy Howard, MS, PharmD: I think that pharmacists are just generally underutilized. It's such a critical component, because we see it in every day when you're having touch points with patients. I can speak from personal example, here in Baltimore City, 40% of our patients read at or below fourth grade level. There is a critical gap in where people's understanding may be and their ability to process and to put into action the things that we're asking them to do in terms of care plans, self-care, any of their treatment modalities and understanding all that stuff. I find myself self-censoring with that button all the time, identifying medical jargon that becomes so integrated into how we speak among ourselves as clinicians, that sometimes it can diffuse into our patient interactions. It's just so critical, because if the person doesn't understand what we're asking of them, I don't see how they can possibly take action on that.

Laura Sahm, PhD: Just in terms of my own experience, I do remember working in pharmacy, and I guess thinking about all of the important things that we do for our patients, like checking that everything is accurate, checking the interactions, checking this, that and the other. We're very process focused. I think a lot of pharmacists would be very much detail oriented and making sure absolutely all I’s are dotted and T's crossed. With that attention to detail on the process, sometimes we can be overwhelmed. There can be administrative tasks, there can be an awful lot of challenges on time. Maybe we don't realize how important that last bit is.

I think that we as pharmacists, we've done this perfectly. It's perfect, and now I'm handing it over, and it's also clear and everything. Maybe we need to have an increased awareness, to Amy's point, of how many people are really struggling with what we consider very basic information. This is our language and just that criticality of even having the talk back, or the teach back, or any of these methods that might take another 30 seconds, could be the difference between somebody understanding and going away with an increased knowledge of their medication, or maybe not.

Howard: I'll just add one other point to contextualize knowing that many of the viewers are US based. In 2003 I think it was where they did the first sort of seminal study on what people's general health literacy knowledge was in the US. When they polled all of those adults and looked at the data, there was somewhere around 12% of the general population had enough health literacy knowledge and ability to operationalize managing a condition or preventing a disease. That means that the bulk of the patients that we're interfacing with are going to need some kind of support or greater context.

Pharmacists are so well poised to answer that question. They are doing that in their day to day and they don't even recognize that they're doing that, because much of our training is already teaching us key things to do. It's really turning on the focused intentionality of realizing that every touch point and interaction we have the ability to capitalize on making sure the understanding is going the extra mile.

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