Health literacy levels of patients who applied to a district outpatient clinic in Malatya city center and related factors

Abstract

This research was carried out to determine the health literacy levels and the factors affecting to the knowledge level of the patients of a district outpatient clinic at the city center of Malatya. It is a descriptive cross-sectional study where the data is obtained from a socio-demographic data set and Turkish Health Literacy Questionnaire -32 (THLQ-32). The data analysis was performed using SPSS 22.0 statistical software. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov normality test was used to determine whether the quantitative data is normally distributed. With the observation of the data not showing a normal distribution Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis variance analysis were used for the statistical analysis. Chi-squared test is used to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference within the qualitative data for a significance level of p<0.05. 49.9% of the patients were male and 50.1% were female. The mean age is 35.94±13.8 years. 24% of the patients had completed secondary school or below while 40.4% had completed higher education. The average index score of the patients according to THLQ-32 is 15.85±11.07. According to THLQ-32 health literacy categories 78.1% of the patients identified as “inadequate”, 14% as “limited-problematic”, 6.3% as “adequate” and 1.6% as “excellent”. We conclude that there is a significant correlation (p<0.05) between gender, marital status, age and education level with health literacy levels respectively. On the other hand there is no statistically significant correlation (p>0.05) among patients with chronic illnesses and their health literacy levels.