60% of the prison population is said to have difficulties in basic literacy skills, while 48% of those involved in the summer riots in 2011 left primary school without achieving the required standard.
There's a direct correlation between poor literacy and crime; a recent UK study by the Literacy Trust revealed that "60percentt of the prison population is said to have difficulties in basic literacy skills".
Explanations put forward for social differentials in health behaviours often focus specifically on the lowest SES group (e.g. severe difficulties in health literacy), and although addressing these may not affect the whole gradient, they could contribute to better health outcomes in the most disadvantaged sector (von Wagner et al, 2009).
The casting of Bob Hoskins in Pennies from Heaven owed something to the fact that every week for two years from 1975 to 1977 he was on BBC1 at Sunday teatime as Alf, the sparky removal man who had reading difficulties, in the adult literacy series On the Move (I was the show's producer).
This demonstrates the link with the community engagement level, and highlights the important role of services in exacerbating existing difficulties in mental health literacy.
In Denmark, around 10 to 20% of the general population perceive difficulties in key health literacy dimensions; ability to understand information well enough to know what to do, and ability to actively engage with healthcare providers.
Given that this study was undertaken in country with a universal healthcare system with multiple policies promoting patient empowerment, patient centred care, user involvement in health planning, and health communication it is concerning that a significant part of the population is reporting difficulties in functional health literacy tasks and in engaging with healthcare providers.
50 Lack of a strong educational foundation contributes to diminished health literacy leading to difficulties in understanding physicians, inabilities to ask necessary questions, take control of one's own health, and ultimately, poorer health outcomes.
This review focuses on phonological awareness (PA) skills and their key role both in literacy acquisition and development and in explaining reading and writing difficulties; in particular, we focus on phonemic awareness, which implies awareness of the smallest speech units.
Worthy and Viise (1996) compared adults in literacy classes with children matched on achievement level for spelling and reported that adults had particular difficulties with inflectional endings.
