University of North Carolina Health Administration Researchers Design Easy-to-Use Health Literacy Test for Latino Population
Researchers in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Department of Health Policy and Administration have designed an easy-to-use health literacy test to help healthcare workers in the U. S. communicate with and care for Spanish-speaking populations.
Chapel Hill, NC (PRWEB) May 6, 2006
Researchers in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Department of Health Policy and Administration have designed an easy-to-use health literacy test to help healthcare workers in the U. S. communicate with and care for Spanish-speaking populations.
Poor health literacy (meaning the inability to understand commonly used health terms) often causes communication problems for Latinos and healthcare staff, resulting in higher healthcare costs, lower quality of care and possible medical errors. The new test, called SAHLSA (Short Assessment of Health Literacy for Spanish-speaking Adults), helps healthcare workers identify patients with low health literacy, thus alerting them to the need to provide alternative communication methods, such as audio, video or pictures.
Shoou-Yih D. Lee, professor of health policy and administration and principal investigator, said the new test is particularly valuable for Spanish-speaking populations because they often face high health threats, such as job-related accidents, and may be reluctant to enter a hospital in the first place because of the language barrier and limited access to insurance.
“It’s not uncommon for bilingual Latino children to act as interpreters for their parents in a hospital setting,” said Lee. “That’s a lot of pressure on a young person to get the information right.”
According to Lee, health professionals working with Latinos have expressed a need for an easy-to-use health literacy test, especially as the Spanish-speaking populations have risen dramatically in some areas of the country. For example, North Carolina has seen its Latino population grow 400 percent from 1990 to 2000.
The test, which is currently available to health organizations, takes a few minutes, and is administered by asking the person being examined to read aloud in Spanish a list of common medical terms, such as embarazo (pregnancy), microbios (germs) and infección (infection). The individual must associate each term to another word similar in meaning to demonstrate comprehension. According to researchers, if the person is having trouble pronouncing words, they are more likely to have difficulty with comprehension.
To research whether or not SAHLSA was a better alternative to evaluating health literacy compared to the current test (called REALM), which took 20 minutes, 201 Spanish-speaking and 202 English-speaking participants from the Ambulatory Care Center at UNC’s Medical Hospital System were recruited for the study. Results showed that SAHLSA not only significantly reduced the time it took to administer the test, but it was also able to be conducted entirely in Spanish, which REALM was not.
The study has been published online in Health Services Research journal and was financially supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRS), an agency of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Also participating in the study were co-investigator Deborah E. Bender, PhD, Rafael E. Ruiz, ScM, and Young Ik Cho, PhD.
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