Evaluation of health literacy rate of postmenopausal women covered by Mashhad health centers in 2018

  Health literacy is one of the social components of health, which plays a vital role in health education and health promotion. The lack of awareness of women and the low level of literacy and its complications reduce the quality of life in postmenopausal women. The key to solving this problem is only to educate women with the right methods of learning. Considering its importance, this study was conducted to determine the health literacy among postmenopausal women in Mashhad. This research is a descriptive-analytic study. The statistical population consisted of 425menopausal women aged between 45and65 years old. The cluster sampling method was performed. The tools used for demographic and adult literacy questionnaires were short forms. The results were analyzed using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and correlation and chi-square tests in SPSS_24 software. The average literacy rate between the target groups was 54.06±20.69 out of100, which is equivalent to the borderline level. In this study, 47.8%of the subjects were inadequate, 17.2% borderline and 35.1% adequate level of health literacy. The overall health literacy score in the sample population indicates that a high percentage of women do not have good health literacy. It should be noted that women need to have enough information to judge whether their symptoms need to be treated and how to monitor medical care in order to empower the group for menopause and its complications. In this regard, awareness of this group about menopause and its complications requires essential interventions