Keywords: health literacy, rational drug use, Family Medicine
Aim:
In our study, it was aimed to determine the levels of health literacy and rational drug use of adult individuals living in Edirne city centre and to investigate the effect of health literacy on rational drug use.
Method:
Our study was carried out with 583 voluntary participants aged 18-64 years who were enrolled in 54 Family Health Units in 23 Family Health Centres in Edirne. The data were collected with a questionnaire including 30 questions questioning the socio-demographic characteristics, reading habits, chronic disease status, health service and drug use habits of the participants, Turkey Health Literacy Scale-32 and Rational Drug Use Scale. Descriptive statistics, Mann Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis and Spearman correlation tests were used to analyse the data. Bonferroni correction was used in the comparison of multiple groups
Results:
Our study was conducted with 292 (50.1%) female and 291 (49.9%) male participants. The mean age of the participants was 39.63±12.79 years. The mean health literacy score of the participants was 35.66±7.74, 22.8% had excellent, 38.4% had adequate, 31.4% had problematic/limited, and 7.4% had inadequate health literacy. The mean rational drug use score of the participants was 37.01±4.48 and 78.2% had adequate rational drug use knowledge. In our study, a significant relationship was found between age, educational status, monthly household income, number of books read in the last year, subjective health status assessment, number of family health centre visits in the last 6 months and total number of health institution visits and health literacy levels. A statistically significant relationship was found between gender, educational status, occupation, monthly household income and number of books read in the last year and rational drug use levels.
Conclusions:
In our study, health literacy was found to be an important factor affecting rational drug use. By improving the level of health literacy, rational drug use will be popularised.
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