Investigating The Level Of Health Literacy Of Adults Living in Edirne Province Center And its Effect on Rational Drug Use

Halim Durgun, Hamdi Nezih Dağdeviren

Keywords: health literacy, rational drug use, Family Medicine

Aim:

In our study, it was aimed to determine the levels of health literacy and rational drug use of adults living in Edirne city centre and to investigate the effect of health literacy on rational drug use.

Method:

Our study was conducted with 583 voluntary participants aged 18-64 years living in Edirne city center. The data were collected with a questionnaire including 30 questions about the sociodemographic characteristics, reading habits, health service and drug use habits of the participants, Turkey Health Literacy Scale-32 and Rational Drug Use Scale.
Descriptive statistics, Mann Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis and Spearman correlation tests were used to analyse the data. p<0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results:

Our study was conducted with 292 (50.1%) female and 291 (49.9%) male participants. The mean age of the participants was 39.63±12.79 years. The mean health literacy score of the participants was 35.66±7.74; 22.8% had excellent, 38.4% had adequate, 31.4% had problematic/limited, and 7.4% had inadequate health literacy. The mean rational drug use score of the participants was 37.01±4.48 and 78.2% had adequate rational drug use knowledge.
In our study, a significant relationship was found between age, educational status, monthly household income, number of books read in the last year, subjective health status assessment, number of family health center visits in the last 6 months and the total number of health institution visits and health literacy levels. A statistically significant relationship was found between gender, educational status, occupation, monthly household income and number of books read in the last year and rational drug use levels. A significant positive correlation was found between the health literacy levels and rational drug use levels of the participants.

Conclusions:

In our study, it was determined that health literacy is an important factor affecting rational drug use. By improving the level of health literacy, rational drug use will be popularised.

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