Parents' health literacy, health numeracy and health information seeking: project report
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2019
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Nichols, S.
Leach, M.
Trenholm, S.
Jones, M.
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Background: Supporting a child's healthy development is determined, in part, by a parent's ability to seek, access, interpret and effectively utilise health information. This aspect of parenting draws on a set of skills often referred to as health literacy and health numeracy. The study described herein, set out to assess the level of health literacy, health numeracy and health information utilisation among parents living in a South Australian regional city.
Design: Cross-sectional survey.
Methods: Parents/carers of primary school aged children, residing in Whyalla, South Australia, were invited to complete the 32-item Parents Using Child Health Information (PUCHI) survey from mid- September to mid- November 2018. The survey was self-administered online, or in paper-based form, or face-to-face with assistance from a researcher.
Results: 155 parents/carers completed the survey, of which 79% were mothers. Most participants were English-speaking (97%), employed (64%) and had two or three children in their family (60%), with 50% holding a tertiary education qualification (50%). This cohort experienced a significant burden of caring for at least one child with a chronic illness (42%). The group with the lowest level of education also had the greatest percentage of families with a chronically ill child (60%).The majority of participants expressed a preference for using medical doctors as their primary source of child health information (88%), followed by the internet (76%) and product leaflets (54%). Parents with the lowest levels of education were least likely to go to a health service website. Presented with a choice of web-pages with varying levels of readability, the majority of respondents chose the site with the greatest amount of information in print form, rather than the examples with visual content.Participant's total All Aspects of Health Literacy Survey (AAHLS) scores were mostly in the mid-range (median 25, IQR 23,27), with lowest scores reported for functional health literacy (median 5, IQR 5,6). General Test of Health Numeracy-6 item (GHNT-6) scores were generally low, with the mean percent correct score found to be 34.5%.
Conclusions: Our findings reveal modest levels of health literacy and low levels of health numeracy among a sample of parents/carers of primary school aged children. Unexpectedly, lower levels of health literacy coincided with moderately high levels of communicative health literacy. Further work is needed to understand the differential effect of parental health literacy and health numeracy on child health outcomes, and the types of strategies that may be effectively employed by parents, clinicians and relevant stakeholders to mitigate the impact of these barriers on a child's healthy development. This study has built an evidence base for the feasibility of this work, in particular it has identified a methodology which has worked with communities experiencing socio-economic disadvantage. It is recommended that targeted approaches are needed to support parents/carers with the lowest levels of education to access and utilise child health information and resources, particularly in recognition of the greater child health care burden experienced by this group.
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Copyright 2019 University of South Australia