The Relationship Between Health Literacy And Self Care Among Marginlized Population Covered By Sbzevar University Of Medical Sciences

Health literacy can be understood as the ability to read, understand, and act on the basis of health and self-care recommendations, to follow a healthy lifestyle to prevent diseases. Health literacy is considered as one of the important components of self-care. The aim of this study was the relationship between of health literacy on self-care and preventive behaviors.

This descriptive-analytical study was performed on 359 people living in the margin of Sabzevar city. Data were collected by questionnaires. Collected data was analyzed using SPSS16 software (descriptive and analytical statistics) using  Correlation Coefficients andT -test and ANOVA.

Most of the subjects had enough health literacy with 54.9%, and only 7.5% had inadequate health literacy level. In addition, 37.6% of people had a borderline health literacy level. The mean of health literacy in men was 84.49 ± 13.66 and the mean of health literacy in women was 86.67 ± 14.02, and also there was no significant difference in health literacy between the two sexes.Of the 359 people surveyed, the highest scores of 206 (57.4%) were moderate and the remaining 153 (42.6%) were poor and none of the subjects scored Have not gotten strong.here was no significant relationship between total health literacy and self-care, but there was a significant relationship between total health literacy with dimensions of self-care including mobility / fatigue, happiness, social functioning and pain. Also, self-care alone had a meaningful relationship with dimensions of health literacy only with the skill dimension of activity, and with other aspects of it there was no meaningful relationship.

On the other hand, due to attention It was suggested that only half of the people had adequate health literacy, and none of them had proper self-care status. Therefore, effective measures are needed to increase the level of health literacy and consequently self-care promotion.