HEALTH LITERACY AMONG WORKERS IN BENIN CITY, EDO STATE

Abstract

Health literacy is the degree to which individuals can obtain, process and understand the basic health information and services they need to make appropriate health decisions.
The objective of study was to determine health literacy level among workers, assess their ability to seek, understand and utilize health information and their capacity to retain and process health information. A cross sectional study of workers was done using a structured self administered one paged questionnaire which contained socio-demographics; health status indeces and functional Health literacy items. A total of 350 questionnaires were distributed but only 300 were returned and analyzed giving a return rate of 85.71%. In the previous 6 months, only 149 (49.7%) of respondents had conducted any form of medical examination. 231 (77%) understood instructions on how to use their drugs and hypertension: 11(3.7%) was the highest disease condition that respondents were aware that they had. 241 (80.3%) knew their blood group while 59(19.7%) did not know their blood group. 41(13.7%) and 145(48.3%) of the respondents also did not know their genotype and Rhesus factor respectively.144( 48%) of respondents had not gone for any medical screening. 149(49.7%) respondents obtained drug information from doctors while 76(25.3%) were from pharmacist. In addition, 43 (14.3%) of respondents could not understand instructions on how to take their medication. Knowledge of availability of vaccines was relatively poor. For HIV/AIDS, 47(15.7 %) of the respondents believe there is vaccine while 130(43.3%) were confident that a vaccine is available for malaria. In conclusion,this study reveals poor attitude to health by the civil servants and the level of health literacy is low thus it is pertinent to design an ideal training program for pharmacists and other health care providers so that they can improve the literacy level in order to achieve better healthcare outcomes of the society