Study On The Health Literacy Status And Its Influencing Factors Of Middle-aged And Elderly People's In Hunan Province

Objective:To find out the prevalence of health literacy in middle-aged and elderly people in Hunan province so that to explore its influencing factors.Materials and methods:The data were from the Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China's project of controling local tobacco and monitoring health literacy by government grant, which started from January 2008. We selected 1188 cases randomly from the database, these selected cases'age were between 45 and 69. The remaining 1154 cases were used of our analysis, excluding 34 cases without major information. We divided health literacy into four dimensions which includes attitudes literacy, knowledge literacy, behavior literacy, and skills perspective literacy. Using one-factor ANOVA, Multiple linear regression analysis and 2-level variance component model for analysis the score of each dimension and total health literacy. We used Epidata3.0 to establish a database and SPSS13.0, SAS9.13 to make statistical analysis.Results:There are only 1.30% of middle-aged and elderly people have health literacy in Hunan Province, and have attitudes literacy, knowledge literacy, behavior literacy, and skills perspective literacy is 52.17%,0.95%,22.96%,0.65%. Hunan Province's middle-aged and elderly people are good at the safety of agricultural chemicals, the health check-up, the consumption of iodized salt, the medical rescue and the immunization. Their weakest domain is the understanding of flammable and high-pressured marking, the harm of passive smoking and the diseases which were spreaded by flies, mosquitoes, rats, cockroaches. One-factor ANOVA shows that the factors affecting middle-aged and elderly people's healthy literacy are region, sex, age, education, marital status, family population, income and occupation. The multiple linear regression analysis demonstrates that region, age, education, marital status, family population, income and occupation are middle-aged and elderly people's healthy literacy's independent factor. From the standardization regression coefficient, we can know that education is the most important factor, income and age are less important, and region is the least one.2-level variance component model analysis shows that education, income, occupation, age, family population, and marital status are middle-aged and elderly people's healthy literacy's independent factor, as well as existing the cities aggregation. Education is the most influential factor, income is less important. These three method's result explains that education, income, occupation and age are the most influential factor of middle-aged and elderly people's healthy literacy.When take healthy literacy intervention, we could choose advanced oldely population, the non-spouse resident, population with low education degree, the low income people and peasant as key intervention crowd.Conclusions:At present, the level of healthy literacy in Hunan Provence's middle-aged and elderly people is low, as well as existing weak domain. The independent factors affecting middle-aged and elderly people's healthy literacy are region, age, education, family population, income and occupation. We could choose advanced oldely population, the non-spouse resident, population with low education degree, the low income people and peasant as key intervention crowd.