Health Literacy in Patients Hospitalized in an Internal Medicine Ward

Abstract

Introduction: Health literacy is a topic of growing popularity given its relevance and impact on clinical outcomes. There are several health literacy assessment tools. The European Health Literacy Survey Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q) is the most recently validated in Europe, it has a validated Portuguese version and it categorizes 4 different degrees of health literacy (excellent, sufficient, problematic and insufficient). Lower degrees of literacy are associated with worse incidence and severity of illness, hospital- ization rates and higher morbidity and mortality. The goal was to assess the health literacy level in relation to healthcare.

Material and Methods: Application of the Portuguese ver- sion of the HLS-EU (HLS-PT) questionnaire to patients admitted to internal medicine care. All patients admitted to the internal medicine ward were initially included. Exclusion criteria were evidence of cognitive or clinical inability to answer the questionnaire.

Results: 64 patients were surveyed. Study population was mostly male (57%) with an average age of 71 years, retired (71.8%) and with low level of education (56.2% with academic education up to junior school). The majority (68.7%) had a prob- lematic or insufficient health literacy.

Conclusion: Although the authors recognize that both the environment of the questionnaire application and the demographic characteristics of this study differ from the national and European study, it is a disturbing result regarding health literacy in hospitalized individuals with chronic diseases.