What Is Needed for Better Health Care: Better Systems, Better Patients or Both?
What Is Needed for Better Health Care: Better Systems, Better Patients or Both?
Patients’ health illiteracy is, in part, a consequence of how the health care system has been set up. Conversely, the flaws of the health care system and the interest groups it caters to can only exist to the degree that patients remain uninformed. Thus, to improve health care, two strategies are presented. The first involves changing the health care system by introducing new, and enforcing existing, guidelines and procedures designed to reduce funding and reporting biases as well as financial conflicts of interests. If a health care system can be freed of these problems, patients, independent of their health literacy level, will be able to get good health care, simply by trusting their doctor and the information provided. The second requires educating the public to increase knowledge about how their health care system works (health system literacy). If patients become more health system literate, they will be able to identify if and why evidence is missing, incomplete, or unreliable and will get better health care because they are not easily misled by nonmedical interests acting within their health care system.
Keywords: Strüngmann Forum Reports, health care funding, health care system, health literacy, medical decision making, reporting bias
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