| Verified against primary record | |
| Personal health literacy | The degree to which individuals can find, understand and use information and services to inform health decisions[1] |
|---|---|
| Organizational health literacy | The degree to which organizations enable individuals to do the same[1] |
| One measured distribution | 53 per cent of adults at intermediate level, 22 per cent basic, 14 per cent below basic, 12 per cent proficient[2] |
| Records read | Two definitional authorities, a national assessment, a catalogue record and a database query, 9 October 2026 |
| Independently reported | |
| Measurement in medical travellers | No open-access indexed study pairing health literacy with medical tourism was returned[3] |
| Bands apply only to the rows beneath them. The measured distribution is from 2003 fieldwork in one country and is not a global figure. | |
Health literacy is the capability a patient needs in order to evaluate a treatment offer, and medical travel asks more of it than domestic care does. A patient choosing a hospital abroad has to assess an unfamiliar regulator, an unfamiliar accreditation scheme, a provider’s own claims and a legal position in another jurisdiction, usually in a second language and without a referring clinician. Whether medical travellers are more or less health literate than other patients does not appear to have been measured.
The definition has two halves
The more useful modern framing splits the concept. Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others. Organizational health literacy is the degree to which organizations enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.[1]
That second half matters more in this field than the first. If health literacy is partly a property of the organisation, then a provider whose website omits risk information is lowering the health literacy of the encounter regardless of the patient’s own capability. The evidence that such omission is common in this sector is set out in conflicts of interest in medical tourism research.
The World Health Organization’s current formulation makes the same point structurally, describing health literacy as representing the personal knowledge and competencies that accumulate through daily activities, social interactions and across generations, and stating that personal knowledge and competencies are mediated by the organizational structures and availability of resources that enable people to access, understand, appraise, and use information and services in ways that promote and maintain good health and well-being for themselves and those around them.[4] That page attributes its wording to a 2021 glossary, whose record was read separately.[5]
One sourcing caution. The widely quoted 1998 wording describing health literacy as a set of cognitive and social skills is frequently presented as the organization’s definition. It is superseded by the formulation above, and for this entry it was reachable only through a secondary source quoting it, so it is not reproduced here.
What measurement looks like
Health literacy is measurable with a validated instrument in a population survey. One national assessment reported that the majority of adults, 53 per cent, had intermediate health literacy, with 12 per cent proficient, 22 per cent basic and 14 per cent below basic.[2]
Three conditions belong with those figures. The fieldwork year is 2003 and the report 2006. They describe adults in one country. And the four levels are that assessment’s own construct rather than a universal scale. A commonly quoted figure of 36 per cent with limited health literacy is a sum of the two lowest categories; that sum was not found stated in the report text read for this entry, so it is not attributed here.
The gap, stated precisely
A metadata search of an open-access journal directory returned no results for health literacy paired with medical tourism, and none for health literacy paired with medical tourist, against a control of 801 results for medical tourism alone.[3]
That result needs careful handling. The directory indexes open-access metadata and abstracts rather than full text, and excludes the paywalled literature, so the honest claim is that no open-access indexed study pairing the two terms surfaced. It is not evidence that none exists. The control query establishes that the endpoint was working and that the medical tourism literature is indexed there at scale, which is what makes the zero result informative rather than merely empty.
Nor was any instrument-based health literacy measurement in a medical travel cohort located by targeted searching. So the capability most obviously relevant to deciding whether to have surgery in another country has not, on the evidence reachable here, been measured in the people making that decision.
Why it would be worth measuring
Two opposite hypotheses are available and neither has been tested. A patient who researches, funds and organises treatment abroad may be unusually health literate, since the task requires exactly those skills. Alternatively, the population travelling for cost reasons overlaps with the population facing access barriers at home, and one population survey found that the factors significantly associated with travelling were having no health plan and cost having prevented a doctor visit, as set out in international patient demographics.
Those point in different directions, which is why the question is worth settling rather than assuming. This entry records it as open.
See also
- Medical tourism and cultural competence, the provider-side counterpart
- International patient demographics, who travels and what predicted it
- Conflicts of interest in medical tourism research, what provider information omits
- Medical travel and language barriers, the language dimension of the same problem
References
- Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, United States Department of Health and Human Services. Health literacy in Healthy People 2030. No date attaches to the definitions on the page, which also carries a notice that the site is being restored to an earlier version under a court order. Verified against primary record: both definitions read. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- Kutner M, Greenberg E, Jin Y, Paulsen C. The health literacy of America’s adults, results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2006-483, September 2006. Verified against primary record: the level distribution read in the report. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- Directory of Open Access Journals. Article metadata search. Queries pairing health literacy with medical tourism and with medical tourist each returned a total of zero, against a control query for medical tourism returning 801. Verified against primary record: the query results are the record; the directory indexes open-access metadata and abstracts only. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- World Health Organization. Health literacy. Fact sheet dated 22 December 2025. Verified against primary record: the definition read in full; the page attributes its wording to the organisation’s health promotion glossary of terms, 2021. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- World Health Organization. Health promotion glossary of terms 2021. Verified against primary record: catalogue record read; the record page does not display the definition text, which was read on the fact sheet instead. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
Sourcing note: the two definitional authorities, the national assessment, the glossary catalogue record and the database query were run and read on 9 October 2026. The zero result is reported as the result of an open-access metadata search with a working control query, and explicitly not as evidence that no such study exists anywhere. The commonly quoted figure summing the two lowest literacy levels is not attributed here, because that sum was not found stated in the report text read. The superseded 1998 definition was reachable only through a secondary source and is not reproduced. The two hypotheses at the end are labelled as untested.