Abstract
In the context of population aging, enhancing the health of older patients has become an urgent issue for public health. Health education and health literacy need to be further understood from the healthcare providers’ standpoint to increase older patients’ effective application of such information into their daily lives. We aimed to further understand nurses’ perspectives on the education of older patients and their health literacy, as nurses are one of the frontline providers interacting with older patients. In total, 16 nurses and nurse practitioners who had 5 or more years of clinical experience participated. Data were collected via face-to-face interviews and emails. Data analysis followed the thematic analysis suggested by Braun and Clarke. Five themes emerged from the analysis, as follows: attitudes that are hard to change; physical and cognitive functional barriers to understanding teaching materials; family caregivers—surrogate vs. gatekeeper; major contexts that moderate the elderly’s health literacy; and strategies to enhance teaching effectiveness and health literacy. These findings illustrate the conditions pertinent to communication with older adults from the patients’, providers’ and healthcare delivery viewpoints. Systemic assistance and interventions specialized for older patients and their healthcare providers need to be developed and tested to improve clinical practice and patient health literacy.
Highlights
Population aging, especially the rapid growth of the population aged 65 years or older, has resulted in many global issues and has challenged healthcare professionals to assist older people in maintaining optimal health status [1]
The project consists of interdependent studies to examine clinical communication patterns, their effectiveness, and barriers to both patients and healthcare providers’ use of health information, which will eventually be used to develop an intervention for healthcare providers
The findings of this study showed that participants perceived older patients to have multiple diverse conditions that are likely to hinder effective education, lower their health literacy, and thereby affect the efficacy of self-care practices
Summary
Population aging, especially the rapid growth of the population aged 65 years or older, has resulted in many global issues and has challenged healthcare professionals to assist older people in maintaining optimal health status [1] This has been challenging because the number of older persons living with multiple health issues has increased as the population has aged, and older patients have been urged to manage their complex health conditions [2]. Previous research on health literacy and older people has clearly shown that older people have difficulties affecting their ability to self-care in addition to their complex health conditions. These include a high prevalence of cognitive impairment [4], including a significant decline of working memory and health literacy over time [5]. Limited health literacy has been associated with poor health outcomes [6]
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