Examples of the impact of low health literacy

NHSE has provided some practical examples of where low health literacy has resulted in communication issues and poor engagement with health services (NHSE, 2022a):

• a woman who sprayed her inhaler on her neck because she had been told to spray it on her “throat”
• a man who did not turn up for cancer tests because he did not know radiology and X-ray department were the same thing
• a man with diabetes who decided to stop taking his medicine because he had trouble understanding the instructions
• a woman who thought chemotherapy would not help because it was given into a vein on the other side of the body to where her cancer was.