A scoping review of measures to assess health professionals’ competencies related to health literacy

Health professionals play an important role in addressing health literacy and ensuring that health systems and information are easy to understand, access, and navigate. We conducted a scoping review to identify and describe measures and tools that assess health professionals' health literacy competency related to knowledge, skills, practices, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavioural intentions. Electronic databases MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PubMed, and Scopus were searched in August 2023 and updated in November 2024. Articles were eligible if they included a measure of health professionals' knowledge, skills, and competencies related to health literacy. We included quantitative studies conducted in all clinical settings and all study types. Two authors independently screened titles, abstracts, and full text articles. The relevant data were extracted and narratively synthesized. In total, 128 articles were identified. We identified 88 unique measures to assess health professionals' health literacy competencies, which were applied across a range of health professional contexts. Overall 59% (n = 76) of tools were purpose-built and used only once. The most frequently assessed domain of health literacy competency was performance-based knowledge, assessed by 45 unique measures. Thirty-seven unique measures reported some form of validity and/or reliability testing, however, of these measures only 16% (n = 6) examined construct validity. This review provides a comprehensive overview of existing measures and highlights the need for rigorous and externally valid tools that are more closely aligned with health literacy competency frameworks.