| Health literacy impacts the health outcomes of many Americans and affects the ability of the health care system to provide consumers with effective, equitable and quality care. Health literacy is the ability to understand, process, and utilize health information effectively in order to enhance health; low health literacy (LHL) is the inability to understand, process, and utilize health information. Low health literacy is a significant contributor to poor health outcomes, financial burden, disease prevention, health promotion, and self-management of chronic diseases. A gap exists between registered nurses knowledge and their clinical practices for healthcare consumers with regards to health literacy. The purpose of this performance improvement project was to increase registered nurses clinical knowledge, skills and attitudes with the practice of health literacy by providing an experiential learning workshop. A quantitative non-experimental descriptive pretest/posttest design was performed on sixteen registered nurses from an outpatient cardiac rehabilitation unit and school of nursing. The Health Literacy Knowledge pretest/posttest and the Health Literacy Experiences Survey was administered. Results of this study revealed registered nurses had a significant increase (p=. 011) in health literacy knowledge following the Nursing Assessment of Health Literacy workshop. Inconsistent responses from the registered nurses were noted for health literacy experiences. Performance improvement strategies, such as the one utilized in this project can narrow the knowledge and practice gap of registered nurses and reduce the financial burden created by low health literacy through improved health outcomes. |
