Aspectos associados ao letramento em saúde e seus instrumentos de avaliação

Abstract

Introduction: Health literacy is defined as a set of skills and competencies to access, understand and apply health information. In Brazil, the lack of health literacy is a challenge, especially for people with low income and education, contributing to disparities in access to health information and health services.

Objective: to analyze the aspects associated with Health Literacy in the Brazilian context and the main scales used to measure it.

Method: this is an explanatory narrative bibliographic review of a descriptive-qualitative nature carried out in the SCIELO, PUBMED (MEDLINE), LILACS and BDENF databases. The Health Sciences Descriptors (DeCS) in Portuguese and their English counterparts are: “Health Literacy”, “Health Promotion”, “Health Education”, “Validation Study”. The articles selected for analysis and interpretation had as criteria: original articles, published in Portuguese and English, between the years 2013 and 2023, that discuss the aforementioned theme and that are related to the objective of this work.

Results and discussion

It is evident that the causes of low LFS are multifactorial, and that several factors can influence its levels, highlighting low education, advanced age and low income. Furthermore, assessment instruments were examined, such as the test of functional health literacy in adults (tofhla), the newest vital sign (nvs) and the health literacy questionnaire (hlq), highlighting their usefulness in measuring health literacy in the Brazilian context. Finally, the importance of these instruments for directing public policies and the need for more advanced studies on the prevalence of health literacy in Brazil are highlighted.