Influence of health literacy on health status
In the research on the influence of health literacy on health status, there are two main index systems to evaluate health status. One is to start directly from the disease, pay attention to the incidence, prevalence, prognosis and effective management of chronic diseases, so as to reflect the health status.
The other is to evaluate the health status from the utilization of medical services, including hospitalization times, hospitalization time and emergency utilization frequency. In addition, self-rated health, which is closely related to health status, is increasingly used as one of the indicators for supplementary evaluation.
Many studies pay attention to the occurrence and development of diseases as evaluation indicators, and draw the conclusion that health literacy is positively related to health status. For example, the research results of the National Center for Medical Statistics show that low health literacy will lead to an increase in the incidence and prevalence of many diseases; Kalishman found through research that health literacy is an important factor affecting the treatment and rehabilitation of AIDS patients.
Functional health literacy is related to the health status and health knowledge of AIDS patients.
Schillinger's research on patients with type 2 diabetes also reached a similar conclusion: patients with insufficient health literacy have poor self-control ability of blood sugar (OR = 2.0；; 95% ci: 1. 1 ~ 3.7), and the incidence of retinopathy is high (or = 2.395% CI: 1.2 ~ 4.6), so he proposed that health literacy is a predictor of health status.
Some experts also discussed the influence of health literacy on health status from the perspective of medical service utilization, and drew positive conclusions. Through path analysis, Young found that people with high health literacy had lower hospitalization frequency (β = 0.24) and emergency service utilization (β =-0.35) than those with low health literacy. Baker investigated 2659 outpatients and emergency patients.
It is found that people with low health literacy tend to have high hospitalization rate and poor self-rated health status. As early as 1992, Weiss suggested that poor health literacy was independently related to poor self-rated health. In addition, many studies show that patients' lack of health literacy is related to poor health and high hospitalization frequency.
No matter which index system is adopted, scholars have found through research that there is a correlation between health literacy and health status, and people with low health literacy are more inclined to have poor health status.
In other words, there are more diseases, more complications and more use of hospitalization and emergency services. Although the conclusions tend to be consistent, the correlation between health literacy and health status has not been clearly determined, which needs further study.