Faculty of Medicine, Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary.
Doctoral School of Health Sciences, University of Debrecen, Debrecen, Hungary.
Front Public Health. 2021 Nov 30;9:725840. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.725840. eCollection 2021.
Health literacy, a recently determined construct plays an important role in how individuals are able to manage their health. A useful approach for the assessment of health literacy is to measure the comprehension of available patient education materials (PEMs). We aimed at assessing the usefulness of PEMS available in Hungarian by testing comprehension of selected PEMs in different groups of users. Comprehension of patient education materials in the domain of healthcare was tested by selecting PEMs and creating questions based on their text in 3 dimensions of health literacy: understand, process/appraise, apply/use. Twenty questions were created that could be answered without pre-existing knowledge by reading the appropriate text taken from PEMs. Comprehension was examined in four groups: laypersons, non-professional healthcare workers, 1st year healthcare students, and 5th year medical students. Readability indices were calculated for the same texts to which questions were created. Laypersons answered <50% of the PEMs-based questions correctly. Non-professional healthcare workers performed better with 57% of right answers but significantly worse than healthcare students or medical students. Those with at least high school qualification (maturity exam) showed significantly higher comprehension compared to those with lower educational attainment. Persons in good or very good health also had significantly better comprehension than those in less favorable health. All readability indices showed that comprehension of the tested PEMs required at least 10 years of schooling or more. Therefore, these PEMS are difficult to understand for persons with less than high school level of education. Rephrasing of the investigated patient educational materials would be recommended so that they better fit the educational attainment of the Hungarian population. Evaluation of the readability and comprehensibility of other PEMs also seems warranted.
健康素养是一个最近确定的概念，它在个体管理自身健康的能力方面发挥着重要作用。评估健康素养的一个有用方法是测量对现有患者教育材料（PEM）的理解程度。我们旨在通过测试不同用户群体对选定 PEM 的理解来评估匈牙利可用 PEM 的有用性。通过选择 PEM 并根据其文本在健康素养的三个维度（理解、处理/评估、应用/使用）创建问题，来测试患者在医疗保健领域的教育材料的理解能力。创建了 20 个问题，这些问题可以通过阅读从 PEM 中提取的适当文本而无需先验知识来回答。在四个组中检查了理解能力：非专业人员、非专业医疗保健工作者、医疗保健专业一年级学生和医学专业五年级学生。为创建问题的同一文本计算了可读性指数。非专业人员正确回答的 PEM 相关问题不到 50%。非专业医疗保健工作者的表现更好，正确率为 57%，但明显不如医疗保健学生或医学生。那些至少具有高中资格（成熟考试）的人表现出的理解能力明显高于教育程度较低的人。健康状况良好或非常好的人在理解方面也明显优于健康状况较差的人。所有可读性指数都表明，测试的 PEM 的理解至少需要 10 年的学校教育或更多。因此，这些 PEM 对于教育程度低于高中的人来说理解起来很困难。建议对所调查的患者教育材料进行改写，使其更符合匈牙利人口的教育程度。评估其他 PEM 的可读性和可理解性似乎也是必要的。
