The concept of health literacy in contemporary nursing

Health literacy is defined as a person's ability to act upon information about health and to effectively use such information to improve their health. The aim of this paper is to map the possibilities of applying this concept in contemporary nursing and to reveal the conditions for and against its use in the nursing profession. We used a content analysis of documents to process the presented study. The scientific databases of EBSCO, ProQuest, Pubmed, ScienceDirect and Scopus were used for the material search between April and May 2016. Based on the analysis of the found sources, we can generally claim that the concept of health literacy can be applied in today's nursing. Thanks to their large representation in the medical population, nurses may therefore significantly contribute to improving the health literacy of the general public and may effectively influence the health care system. A necessary step to maximize health literacy in the nursing profession is a more intense integration of the mentioned issue into educational curricula. This step, however, is not the only solution. An unavoidable condition is the existence of nurses, with both the personal-social and emotional competence, equipped with skills such as communication, empathy, listening and the willingness to devote more time to a patient. However, it is necessary to note that there was not a single Czech study dealing with the presented topic from the perspective of nursing. This fact seems to be a great challenge for all professionals in nursing and clinical practice.