The Relationship between Health Literacy and Monitoring Indicators of the Elderly Diabetes Patients

Abstract

Introduction: The report of health literacy by IOM displayed that lack of health literacy causes negative effect on prognosis and patient safety. According to literature which point out the correlation between health literacy and diabetes, this paper aim to explore the relationship between health literacy and complication, HbA1c and ACR (microalbumin creatinine ratio). Methods: This is a cross-section retrospective study. Using self-administrated questionnaires to asses diabetic patients' comprehension of taking medicine. The population of this study are chosen from patients of Dr. Laih in St. Joseph's hospital whom are over 65 years old and literate. Data analysis adapts regression analysis, ANOVA and Chi-square test. Result: We issued 35 questionnaires and collected 29 effective questionnaires. The participants were grouped by health literacy score into high(＞5) and low(≤5) sets, then counted the numbers of high level of HbA1c(＞7.0) and low level of HbA1c(≤7) in each set. The result shows that relationship between health literacy and HbA1c is no significant difference by Chi-square test (p=0.9892). As the relationship between health literacy and ACR, we calculated the improvement-rate by the recent two data which differentiates the better and the worse state of diabetes. The correlation coefficient is 0.0011, the result of ANOVA indicates no significant related (p=0.8749). Discussion: Health literacy is without doubt a useful skill of patients. The questionnaires focus on comprehension of medicine information, but most of elderly diabetic patients have their families or personal care worker who will take care of medicine taking. Although they got low score of health literacy, they control the status of diabetes well. In conclusion, we suggest to design the study more completely and consider more variables to realize the importance of health literacy on disease controlling.