Searching for an alliance with journalism: a survey to investigate health literacy in Italy

Objectives: This study (GLASS) aimed to explore low health literacy (HL) prevalence among journalists and general population and factors associated with low HL. Methods: GLASS was an Italian online cross-sectional study. Questionnaires included instruments for different HL dimensions: single item literacy screener (SILS), medical term recognition test (METER), medical data interpretation test (MDIT). For each instrument, multiple regressions were performed. Results: Participants were 665. A total of 24.6%, 85.0%, and 58.9% journalists and 19.5%, 77.8%, and 62.6% general population reported low HL (SILS, METER, MDIT, respectively). Regressions showed that journalists who had never written about health and journalists who had personally written about health without being health journalists had a higher likelihood of low HL compared with health journalists. Conclusion: Since journalists are key players in public health, our findings are relevant; especially considering the context of the current pandemic. It would be advisable to bolster a stronger collaboration between professionals in the media world and the scientific community.