Addressing Health Illiteracy in the Hispanic Community – A Call to Action: An Integrative Review

The United States Hispanic population is rapidly growing; however, existing healthcare endeavors are insufficiently accommodating this expansion. This demographic is linked to multiple serious health problems, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiac disease, cancer, and liver disease. In order to improve health outcomes within this community, interventions, such as health literacy screening, need to be further explored to identify current insufficiencies and help this population overcome these health challenges. This integrative review seeks to determine the effectiveness of current health literacy screening tools among native Spanish speakers in the U.S. This review seeks to amalgamate data from various studies to demonstrate common health problems and barriers experienced by the Hispanic community, the benefit of health literacy for positive client outcomes, and what health literacy screening tools are presently available. This review will be of benefit by further delving into the existing health literacy screening resources, determining which are successful/unsuccessful, and explaining why/why not. Dissemination of this discerned information will help to highlight the benefit of current screening and direct continued research on this topic, particularly for subsequent interventions.