The Health Literacy paper to me did not come across as a validation study - it compared how well a three question tool compared to the s-TOFHLA. While it seems that this is an important step to determine if this three question tool can help identify those who have decreased health literacy, a true validation study would have used cross-validation (training and test sets) and/or compared to other populations. It seems like it would be a simple three question test to identify those who need more assistance with forms, but how reproducible it is is unclear to me.
For the mental health paper, it seemed like a positive step forward in further assessing how much rural vs. urban populations actually used mental health services, but it did not seem to advance the question of how to address it - was it all due to income and barriers to traveling to appointments or is it because of the paucity of providers? Answering these questions would help assess how to better serve rural patients.
For the mental health paper, it seemed like a positive step forward in further assessing how much rural vs. urban populations actually used mental health services, but it did not seem to advance the question of how to address it - was it all due to income and barriers to traveling to appointments or is it because of the paucity of providers? Answering these questions would help assess how to better serve rural patients.