Relationship Between Medication Literacy, Health Literacy, and Medication Behavior Among Medical School Students: A Cross-sectional Study

Nowadays, college students are more accessible and susceptible to being exposed to mixed information than ever, which results in a growing concern about their health problems and medication behaviors. This study aimed to investigate the correlation between medication literacy, health literacy, and medication behavior among medical school students.

A cluster random sampling method was used to select 1324 undergraduate students from a medical school in China as participants for the questionnaire survey in 2020. After quality control, 1183 valid questionnaires were collected (an effective rate of 89.4%). Descriptive statistics analysis, chi-square test, binary logistic regression analysis, and path analysis were conducted using SPSS 25.0.

Of the 1183 respondents whose mean age was 19.06, 164 (13.9%) were considered to have good medication literacy, 150 (12.7%) had good health literacy, and 497(42.0%) exhibited good medication behaviors. Lower grades, higher health literacy levels, and higher medication literacy levels were effective in better performance on medication use behavior (P < 0.001). Poor self-assessment of health status was correlated with worse medication behavior (P < 0.05). it was concluded that medication literacy may be an intermediate variable linking health literacy and medication use behavior.

Students in the medical college showed much higher rates of rational medication use when they have medication and health literacy. There was an indirect positive relationship between health literacy and medication behavior through medication literacy (P < 0.001). Therefore, health literacy and medication literacy can be an essential part of medication safety education for college students as well as an ideal indicator for educational outcome evaluation.