European health literacy scale (HLS-EU-BR) applied in a Brazilian higher education population of Rio Grande do Sul (RS)

Abstract

Several scales have been built to evaluate the health literacy levels of populations. For this study the European Health Literacy Survey (HLS-EU) (Sorensen, 2012) was selected to assess the health literacy levels in a diversified sample of higher education students and lecturers. The main goal was to evaluate whether this European HLS-EU scale is appropriate for discriminating health literacy levels in a higher education population, including university and polytechnic students and lecturers of different scientific fields and educational levels, since undergraduates up to university lecturers. Four groups of participants were obtained: (i) 21 undergraduate students in agribusiness, (ii) 40 undergraduate students in computational science, (iii) 31 master students and professionals in the field of health; (iv) 87 master, PhD students and lecturers holding a master or PhD degree, most of them in the field of Education. The Cronbach's alpha test showed that the global HLS-EU-BR, the Disease Prevention items and Health Promotion items had “Excellent” internal consistency (0.95, 0.90 and 0.90, respectively) and Healthcare items had “Good” internal consistency (0.89). The majority of the respondents exhibited “Problematic” (37.4%) and “Sufficient” (34.7%) health literacy. “Inadequate” health literacy was found in 17.3% of the respondents and only 10.6% showed “Excellent” health literacy. No differences (p>0.05) were found between age groups. Females had higher levels of health literacy as compared with men (p<0.05). As expected, strong differences (p<0.0001) on health literacy were found between groups having and having not experience in working in the health sector or having health training. Having in mind that this sample is mainly composed of teachers and teachers to be, these results indicate that more emphasis in health issues should be given in teachers training in order to make teachers more sensitive to healthy issues and to get better competencies for teaching these issues in basic education.