Croakey – An urgent call for governments to improve pandemic communications, and address health literacy concerns

The COVID-19 crisis is highlighting an urgent need to improve the health literacy of our institutions and the public, according to the authors below.

Millions of Australians do not have sufficient health literacy to understand complex COVID-19 communications, and this problem is exacerbated by the failure of governments to enact best practice in communications (see the Federal Health Department website for an example of this).

Given these concerns, the authors question whether it is fair to penalise community members who fail to abide by the new public health laws, warning “that some individuals will pay a heavy price for failures in government communication and this will disproportionately affect those least able to pay”.