Nearly a quarter of adults worldwide struggle to find, understand and act on basic health information, the World Economic Forum reported, a gap that carries a measurable cost. Low health literacy shortens healthy life expectancy, delays diagnoses, drives avoidable illness and pushes up spending, the forum said, and it does so quietly, without ever showing up as a line in a health budget.
The figure that gives the problem its weight is an economic one. Research by Economist Impact, backed by the consumer health company Haleon, found that cutting low health literacy by a quarter across 40 countries could save health systems about $303 billion a year, the World Economic Forum reported. Economist Impact argued that health literacy should be treated as a lever for productivity and cost control rather than a soft aspiration at the edge of public health.
An uneven burden
Low health literacy does not fall evenly. People facing poverty, chronic illness, disability, language barriers or digital exclusion carry more of it, the World Economic Forum reported, and modern health systems make that worse by moving care onto apps and portals that assume a confidence many patients do not have. Economist Impact found that while about 80 per cent of people say they want to manage their own health, only around 20 per cent feel confident doing so. That gap between wanting and being able is where preventable illness and avoidable cost collect.
For cross-border care the stakes are sharper still. A patient who travels for treatment already faces a foreign language, an unfamiliar system and follow-up that falls to a home doctor who never saw the operation. Low health literacy compounds each of those, which is why the parts of medical tourism that fail first are rarely the surgery and often the consent form, the discharge notes and the after-care instructions. The point sits alongside the standing warning that cross-border patients carry more risk than the price tag shows.
Five steps, and the gap after them
Economist Impact set out five steps, the World Economic Forum reported. Governments should weave health literacy through health, education and social policy. Health systems should carry more of the load themselves, through plain language, multilingual materials and methods such as the NHS teach-back approach, where a patient repeats advice back to a clinician to confirm it landed. Information should come in formats people can actually use. Misinformation, which spreads fastest among those with the least health literacy, should be countered at the source. Progress should be measured with tools that travel across cultures rather than one country’s yardstick.
Community pharmacists sit near the centre of that work, the World Economic Forum reported, well placed to counter misinformation and steer people toward trusted sources. Artificial intelligence can help simplify wording and scale translation, the forum said, though clinicians should stay in the loop.
Some of this is already in motion, the forum said. Scotland, Australia and China have each introduced national health literacy strategies, though the World Economic Forum reported that implementation lags behind the plans in most of them. The World Health Organization runs a measurement network, MPOHL, that now spans 29 countries. Haleon’s Better Everyday Health Project, working with CARE International, trains local health workers it calls Community Health Entrepreneurs to deliver tailored advice, an approach Economist Impact credited with improving self-care in Kisumu County, Kenya.
The through-line is a distinction between symptom and strategy. Treating illness once it presents is the symptom side of any health system, expensive and unavoidable. Health literacy sits on the strategy side, cheap by comparison and easy to neglect precisely because its payoff shows up as illness that never happens and cost that never lands. That is a hard case to fund, which is why the $303 billion estimate matters: it puts a number on the cost of doing nothing. The same fiscal squeeze runs through wider global health, where gains and funding are moving in opposite directions.
What to watch
The tests here are slow but checkable. The first is whether the $303 billion estimate ever turns into a budget line in any of the 40 countries the research covered, or stays a figure in a report. The second is whether Scotland, Australia and China close the gap between their published strategies and what patients actually meet at the clinic door, and whether pilots like the Haleon project in Kisumu County, Kenya, scale beyond a single county. A third test belongs to the medical tourism trade specifically, whether hospitals that court foreign patients supply consent forms, discharge notes and after-care instructions in a language those patients read, or keep treating language as an add-on to care rather than a part of it.