Pharmacist Counseling with Low Health Literacy Patients

Yu-Hui Hung ； Elizabeth H. Chang

《第六屆亞洲健康識能國際會議》 預刊文章 Pp. 1-3

https://doi.org/10.6881/AHLA.201810.SR02

摘要

Background Low health literacy is associated with difficulty to access health information, lower ability to understand medication instructions, and higher possibility of medication non-adherence, which could lead to increased hospitalization and emergency care use. Pharmacists are in a good position to promote health literacy of their patients; however, pharmacists' understanding of health literacy and their mechanisms to educate patients with low health literacy is unclear. Objective To assess pharmacists' understanding of health literacy, discover their observations of patients with low health literacy, and explore pharmacists' strategies of counseling such patients. Methods Four semi-structured focus groups of 60-90 minutes each were conducted with purposefully-sampled, experienced hospital or community pharmacists in Northern, Eastern, Western and Southern Taiwan. In addition, a questionnaire was distributed at the beginning of each focus group to assess pharmacist baseline knowledge and background. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed. Descriptive statistics was used to summarize questionnaire results. Results A total of 24 pharmacists, aged 23-60 with 58% of them males, were interviewed. The average knowledge score of health literacy was 7.75 of 10 (range 5-10). Four themes were identified: (1) Pharmacists' understanding of health literacy was not consistent due to their various education and experience; (2) Pharmacists identified difficulties in patient education in each of the following domains: obtaining, processing, understanding health or medication information and making appropriate decisions; (3) The depth of patient counseling strategies could be classified into five levels, which were words, concepts, materials, actions, and goals; (4) Patients' health literacy could further be influenced by the attitude, background, and relationship of the patient-pharmacist dyads. Other external factors include limited time and resources and lack of policy support. Conclusion While pharmacists may have various levels of understanding of health literacy, they were able to identify areas where patients struggle with health information and come up with creative solutions to improve patient understanding and promote medication adherence. Summarizing these struggles and education strategies can be helpful in training current and future healthcare providers to enhance their applications of health literacy principles.

關鍵字

health literacy ； pharmacist ； counselling