Health Literacy in Korean Adults and Its Policy Implications
제목
Health Literacy in Korean Adults and Its Policy Implications
저자
Choi, Seul Ki
발행연도
2021-12-21
발행기관
Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs
인용정보
Research in Brief, vol. 88, pp. 1 - 8
초록
Floods of health information pour out to meet the public’s ever-growing interests in health. But this is where quantitative growth does not imply qualitative growth. Many people seek health information—be it on health promotion, disease prevention or treatment—from media outlets, the internet and medical professionals and from other people around them. As a result, concerns have persistently been raised as to the reliability of the information people obtain from media outlets and internet platforms. There is another problem that for all the inundating information, some socially-vulnerable groups still lack digital access, and thus suffer low access to health information. The importance of health literacy is more pronounced now as, after the covid-19 pandemic, with floods of health information comes an increasing amount of health misinformation. Health literacy is defined by Nutbeam as the “personal, cognitive and social skills which determine the ability of individuals to gain access to, understand, and use information to promote and maintain good health.” For Sørensen et al., health literacy is a complex set of “individual skills to obtain, process and understand health information and services necessary to make appropriate health decisions.” Also, health literacy “promotes individual, family and community health-seeking behaviors, empowers individual citizens to demand rights and quality services, and enables engagement in collective health promotion action.” A couple of studies conducted in the recent past have found that health literacy has to do with a wide range of health areas including healthy living behaviors, disease prevalence, chronic disease management, health service use and mortality. Promoting health literacy is a core strategy for promoting national health and reducing health disparities, and pursued by many countries around the world, along with the World Health Organization, as a key agenda item. A health literacy gap may lead to health disparities and, in turn, to health inequalities tilted against the elderly, low-income groups and people with low education levels, who in many cases have low health literacy. Via its Shanghai Declaration in 2016, the WHO has prioritized health literacy as a core strategy for health promotion and called on governments around the world to place policy attention on the health literacy of socioeconomically-vulnerable groups. Some major countries have sought on many fronts to promote people’s health literacy, seeing low health literacy as hampering health policy implementation and health promotion. However, it is only recently that health literacy has become a subject of policy attention in Korea with the implementation of the National Health Promotion Plan 2030, which takes as one of its goals “raising people’s understanding of health information. This study presents some of the findings of a 2020 survey of health literacy conducted by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, and examines Koreans’ health literacy and factors associated with it. The subjects, 1,002 adults (aged 19~69) quota-sampled according to sex, age and the population size of localities, were surveyed online with a structured questionnaire. The items surveyed include the respondents’ health literacy, health level, health-seeking behavior, health information searching experiences, and sociodemographic characteristics. The questionnaire used is HLS-EU-Q16. The measures of “health level and health-seeking behavior” concern the respondents’ prevalence of chronic illness, subjective health status, medical check-up status, unmet health care needs, smoking prevalence, drinking patterns, practice of physical activity, healthy eating practice, and checking of nutrition facts. “Health information search experiences” are about the respondents’ frequency of health information seeking, experienced difficulty in seeking health information, sources of health information (in order of frequency of use), and satisfaction with the information obtained from the sources.
