As populations age, adults aged 45 years and over increasingly require digital health literacy skills to navigate digitised healthcare, evaluate online information, and make informed decisions. Health literacy is defined by the World Health Organisation as the knowledge and confidence to access, understand, evaluate, and use health information to maintain wellbeing. Digital health literacy extends this concept to digital contexts, enabling individuals to locate, assess, and apply online health resources. In positive and humanistic psychology, adults in the second half of life are viewed as being in a crucial period for continued growth, leading to greater wholeness and wisdom, not just decline. This perspective focuses on potential and emphasises concepts like Erikson’s “ego integrity” versus “despair”, and Jung’s “individuation”. Assessing digital health literacy through this lens provides an opportunity to reduce the higher exclusion rates observed among adults aged 45 years and older compared with younger cohorts. Further, this age group experiences more biological barriers (e.g., age-related changes in vision and cognition) as well as psychological barriers (e.g., lower self-efficacy). Improving one’s digital health literacy can reduce isolation, enhance autonomy, and improve healthcare engagement, yet many interventions focus narrowly on improving technical skills (e.g., successfully navigating the internet) rather than enhancing the critical and reflective competencies essential for meaningful engagement with health information.

To understand current digital health literacy levels and related training needs of adults aged 45 years and over, the use of the biological-psychological-social framework, integrating ‘digital’ as a fourth dimension is proposed. The aim is to create a holistic, person-centred program, providing skillsets through co-development and prototype tailored solutions ready for roll-out. Taking this approach should be more effective, relevant, and sustainable for this cohort than existing skills-based approaches.

Watch Rachel’s Confirmation of Candidature Presentation here