Health literacy and patient rights awareness in ethnic Hungarian mothers in Eastern Europe.

Abstract

The paper proposes to identify the determinants of patients' rights awareness in mothers and to examine the relationship of health literacy with awareness of those rights. Our results are based on data from a convenience sample of 894 non-health professional ethnic Hungarian mothers from Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. Health literacy is measured with the HLS-EU-16 questionnaire. Analysis of variance reveals a significant association of health literacy with patient rights awareness. Our results show that health literacy is the highest among patients who filed a complaint through formal channels and/or took legal measures to restore their rights upon violation. A logistic regression model is built to identify the likelihood of having high patient rights awareness, that is, acting formally for the restoration of rights upon infringement. The model controls for covariates. When controlled for covariates, the likelihood of having high patient rights awareness increases with age, and is higher for mothers with highest education, for inhabitants of larger towns, as well as for those with adequate health literacy. The findings of our study have implications for health policy, as they reveal significant inequalities in patient rights culture.