Enhancing Health Literacy Through Effective Communication

This research aims to enhance healthcare communication strategies to ensure safer, more effective provision of healthcare services and to improve patient outcomes. In a recent discussion, she reflected on her dual background, noting how it facilitates knowledge transfer among the Arts, Humanities, and Medicine.   

Two decades ago, when Prof. Zayts began her academic career in Hong Kong, there was a real scarcity of work on healthcare communication in the region. Through the work of Prof. Zayts, her team, and other colleagues across Hong Kong's universities and community collaborators, effective healthcare communication is now recognised as a core area of research, training, and community outreach in the city. The importance of effective health communication was also underscored by the recent pandemic. Over the years, Prof. Zayts and her team’s work on healthcare communication has encompassed topics and settings as diverse as mental health, women’s health, advanced care planning, and reproductive health, to name a few. Their work highlights pressing public health challenges that could be best addressed through interdisciplinary collaborations and knowledge exchange.

One area of Prof Zayts and team’s work is health literacy, which was examined through the lenses of a qualitative approach of discourse analysis. Such a discursive approach emphasises the active co-construction of health knowledge by all relevant parties through communication. This approach challenges traditional views of patients as passive and uninformed recipients of information, positioning them instead as "lay experts" who actively contribute to their own health. Patients are a key stakeholder group in this type of research.