The Role of General Health and Health Literacy in Self-Care Behaviors of Patients with Covid-19

Self-care is an important concept in controlling COVID-19 disease and a simple and effective way to maintain and improve health. This study aimed to examine the role of general health and health literacy in predicting the self-care behaviors of patients with COVID-19.

This research was a cross-sectional study with a predictive correlational design. The sample consisted of 385 patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 infection referring to the COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment center in Shahid Beheshti Hospital in Kashan City, Iran, from June to September 2021. The subjects were under quarantine at home and were recruited by convenience sampling. The data were collected by the general health questionnaire (GHQ-28), the Iranian health literacy questionnaire (IHLQ), and a researcher-made questionnaire on self-care behaviors in patients with COVID-19 (SCB-COVID-19). The Pearson correlation coefficient, t-test, and logistic regression were used for data analysis in SPSS software, version 19. The significance level was set at P<0.05.

The Mean±SD scores of self-care behaviors, health literacy, and general health of the subjects were 224.89±21.49, 63.78±21.28, and 50.99±12.81, respectively. There were significant relationships between self-care behaviors and health literacy (r=0.567, P=0.001) and self-care behaviors and general health (r=235, P=0.001). Logistic regression showed that about 42% of self-care behaviors score changes are explained by health literacy and general health variables (R2=0.42)

The results showed that self-care behaviors score changes are explained by health literacy and general health in COVID-19 patients. Our results can integrate into the body of knowledge to help improve the health and well-being of populations in the COVID-19 outbreak.