Health Literacy on Diabetes mellitus in a rural community of Odisha state, India - A cross-sectional Study

Himanshu Sekhar Pradhan ； Kavitha AK ； Ira Dash ； Subharanjan Jena ； M Mahadev Pal ； Sudhir Kumar Satpathy

《第六屆亞洲健康識能國際會議》 預刊文章 Pp. 1-2

https://doi.org/10.6881/AHLA.201810.SJ02

摘要

Background: Nearly 61% of deaths in India are now attributed to NCDs. With more than 63 million cases, diabetes has assumed a potential epidemic status in India and a major public health problem. People thus need to make daily health-related decisions for both prevention and management of diabetes. Health Literacy matters much for living a healthy live to prevent diabetes and take care of them in case they suffer. Government of India's National Health Portal mentions health literacy as the number one objective. Data on level of health literacy among general population in India is very scanty. The purpose of this study is to assess the difficulty in accessing, understanding and using the health information relating to diabetes in Paniora village, Jatni block, Khordha district of Odisha state, India. Methods: This study is a cross-sectional survey design that used the European Health Literacy (HLS-EU) Q47 tool, validated for use in Asia Pacific countries, contextualized to diabetes for the study purpose. Households were randomly selected from the study village and household members having the age group 15 years and above were interviewed. The sample size of the study was 358. Data was collected by Master of Public Health Students, entered and analyzed by Epi-info and SPSS software respectively. Findings: Of the 358(150 males and 208 females) aged 15 years and above were interviewed. 19.8% of the respondents were illiterate. Nearly 57% and 64.2% of the respondents find it difficult to access information about the symptoms and treatment of diabetes respectively. Only 32.4% of the respondents find it easy to get information how to prevent diabetes. A little over one third (35.2%) of the respondents find it easy to get the information on health activities such as exercise, healthy food and nutrition related to diabetes. Nearly 70% did not understand why they need health screening for diabetes. 62.8% of respondents find difficulty to judge the realibility of health warning such as smoking, low physical activity and drinking too much in connection with diabetes. 72.4% of respondents did not feel the importance of taking part in activities for health and wellbeing in their community. The findings reflect overall poor health literacy status among the rural community irrespective of their general literacy status. Conclusion: The findings call for more evidence generation in relation to the ease of access to health information to prevent and prevent diabetes and NCDs.

關鍵字

Health literacy ； diabetes ； rural community