Evaluation of health literacy among the inner mongolian citizens

Abstract

Introduction: In recent years, many countries are conducting the studies on the assessment of the “Health Literacy” concept; in its turn, these research works cover the quality of the health care and services and its changes too. Purpose: The study aimed to evaluate the health literacy among the Inner Mongolian citizens. Methods and materials: We employed analytical cross-sectional research method for the study. It covered totally 742 inner Mongolian citizens and they were asked by ‘Health literacy’ survey questionnaire published by WHO. The survey questions were prepared by the table that were developed by the American researchers Price, Dake, Murnan. The statistical analysis was performed by SPSS-23. Results: The 9%, 38.5%, 22.1% and 8.2% of the participants were at age of 18-30, 31-40, 41-50, and above 61, respectively. The 54.2% of the respondents evaluated their health as “good”, 1.2% - as “very bad”. According to the evaluation of the citizens health,37.8% of the people were sick more than one, 33.4% of them smoked, and 67.8% were alcoholics. Regarding the health improvement decision, the 3.4% of respondents said that they had serious problems, while 49.3% of them answered that they had problems. And 58.8% of them answered that they can easily do the exercises, but the 1.3% of them had very serious problems to do the exercises. Conclusion: We concluded that the survey participants evaluated their health as “average” or “lower than average” (37.5%), people who were admitted to the hospital multiple times were 37.8% - the 33.4% of them were smokers, and 49.3% have some health improvement decision making difficulties. Thus, we see the need for providing the training on health knowledge and skills among the certain number of the population.