COTA Australia recently responded to the Department of Health’s Consultation Paper: Development of the National Health Literacy Strategy (August 2022).
Our response affirms older people value health literacy. We understand being health literate can profoundly affect our capacity to understand and engage confidently with medical and health professionals, as well as establish and maintain practices that facilitate good health and wellbeing.
COTA Australia strongly supports the move towards a national approach to health literacy. We see this as being essential to providing a systematic, evidence-based, conceptual schema and common language.
From our perspective, having a National Health Literacy Strategy will increase the potential for a more ongoing collaborative approach to achieving optimal physical, oral and psychological health outcomes for individuals across the life course, as well as reduce people’s need for more expensive and intrusive health treatments. For more detail, read our submission
