Health Literacy of Hypertension in Hypertensive Patients in Sam Liam Community, Khon Kaen Province

Abstract

Background and Objectives: The Thai population aged 15 years and over was hypertensive as high as 24.7%. In 2017 the casualties from complications of hypertension were 131,248. It thus becomes interesting in studying proportion of health literacy about hypertension, the health behavior of hypertensive patients, and the correlation between 2 variables as above in Sam Liam community.

Methods: This was a descriptive study in 810 hypertensive patients in Sam Liam community and 104 volunteers were used by simple random sampling. Self-administered questionnaires were applied for data collection. Descriptive-statistical analysis was conducted by proportion, median, interquartile range, minimum, maximum, 95%CI,  and ordinal chi-square.

Results: The overall response rate was 84.61%. There were hypertensive patients who have health literacy about hypertension at the high levels of 42% (95% CI 31.8 - 53.0). Half of all patients have understanding of the general knowledge at medium level. The 45.45% have understanding of factors affected blood pressure at high level, and the 79.54% have high level of understanding of severity and complications. Almost half of all patients have health behavior at the moderate levels (47.7%, 95%CI 37.1 - 58.6). There was no statistically correlation between health literacy and health behavior (p-value=0.896).

Conclusion: Most patients had health literacy about hypertension at the high level but have health behavior at the average level. Therefore, there were no statistically correlations between health literacy of hypertension and health behavior.