Research Guides: Health Literacy: Numeracy

Numeracy

Numeracy is the ability to access, use, interpret, and communicate mathematical information and ideas, to engage in and manage mathematical demands of a range of situations in adult life. Numerical operations and statistical expressions are often difficult for people to understand. Most health materials use numbers in ways that exceed the skills of the average high school graduate.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: Tool 5, the SHARE Approach: Communicating Numbers to Your Patients
This online handout offers tips to help patients make sense of numbers.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Numeracy
Provides data on adults’ literacy and numeracy skills.
FDA: Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence Based Users Guide
Information on how to communicate risks to patients.
Health Numeracy: How Do Patients Handle the Concept of Quantity When It Relates to Their Health?
Helen Osborne, health literacy expert, provides information about health numeracy on her blog.
Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics
Steven Woloshin, MD, MS, Lisa M. Schwartz, MD, MS, and H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH.
Berkeley (CA): University of California Press; 2008.
ISBN-13: 978-0-520-25222-6
The goal of this book is to help you better understand health information by teaching you about the numbers behind the messages—the medical statistics on which the claims are based. The book will also familiarize you with risk charts, which are designed to help you put your health concerns in perspective.
Multiplying Strategies for Communicating Numbers
A slide deck shared by health literacy expert Helen Osborne about numeracy and strategies for helping patients with numeracy.
National Academy of Medicine Discussion Paper: Strategies to Enhance Numeracy Skills
Provides several useful strategies to enhance patients' numeracy skills.
National Cancer Institute: Making Data Talk
A workbook showing how to present data to a public audience.

Pictograms/Images

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Public Health Images
A public health image database.
Icon Array
Help your patients understand the concept of risk by creating an icon array. You can save it as a link, download it, and embed it.
National Cancer Institute: Visuals Online
Contains an image database containing a variety of cancer-related images.
The Noun Project
A collection of icons including many health icons and images.
USP Pictograms
USP Pictograms are standardized graphic images that help convey medication instructions, precautions, and/or warnings to patients and consumers. Pictograms are particularly helpful in passing on important information to patients with a lower level reading ability and patients for whom English is a second language.
Visualizing Health
Visualizing Health is a style guide that is intended to serve as both inspiration and instruction to health professionals and others seeking to communicate health risk information to the public.