Health Literacy in Geriatric Patients

As treatments become more sophisticated and the healthcare system becomes more complex, health literacy (HL) assumes an ever-greater importance in the therapeutic alliance between healthcare professionals and patients.

Limited health literacy causes difficulty in understanding one's health condition. As a result, it is associated with less adherence to self-care behaviours, increased mortality, increased hospitalizations, other adverse health outcomes, and high healthcare costs. In those over aged 65, health literacy is positively influenced by levels of educational attainment and literacy practices in the home, male gender, and weakly by informal learning and self-study and adult education experience. Negative associations include being foreign-born and failure to learn from exposure to various contexts. Understanding the health literacy of patients is particularly vital for geriatricians as older adults referred to geriatric medicine clinics already experience barriers to high quality care due to the frequent presence of cognitive impairment and multiple comorbidities.

The interaction among these variables and health literacy in a tertiary care setting for older adults with cognitive impairment remains under-explored. Given the dependent state of many cognitively impaired individuals, the responsibility lies with geriatricians to adjust their communication and care strategies according to the HL levels of their patients. Studying the association between the accuracy of geriatrician-perceived HL and health outcomes could reveal the extent to which physician communication impacts these outcomes. Given these intertwined factors, a 6-month follow-up is crucial to capture the longitudinal associations of HL on patient outcomes, providing a more comprehensive picture of how these variables interact over time.

This study's primary outcome is the evaluation of patient health literacy and the level of agreement between the geriatric team's perception and objectively measured health literacy. The secondary outcome is assessing how patient health literacy is associated with medication adherence and future planning. As well, the investigators hope to assess how patient health literacy is associated with emergency department visits, hospitalizations, hospital length of stay, remaining home, long-term care admission and mortality within 6 months.

Inclusion criteria

• Patients (both new and follow up) attending St. Peter's Hospital Geriatric Clinic
• Willingness to participate in the study (caregiver can rate HL for patient if patient unable to)
• Consenting to study (by patient or caregiver)

Exclusion criteria

• Behavior (e.g. behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia) which may be aggravated by additional questions
• Acute illness preventing participation
• Terminal illness that would prevent 6-month telephone follow up
• Previous participation in this study