L'alfabetització per a la salut de les persones grans amb patologia crònica: revisió bibliogràfica

Abstract

Background: Countries around the world are facing the demographic aging, which means an increase of the elderly. In fact, about 80% of this population have at least one chronic health problem. To make the aging of this population active and healthy it is essential to educate them in health. Improving health literacy and training the elderly to use in an effective way health information, is fundamental for empowerment. Objectives: To know the existing evidence on the effectiveness of the educational health literacy programs in elderly people with chronic diseases. It is also studied which types of programs are the most effective and are analysed the differences between gender and the type of chronic disease. Methods: The design of the research is a bibliographic review. The search for articles has been done in the PubMed, CINAHL and Scielo databases. During the months February to April of 2018, 9 articles have been included in this research after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Results: The results show that the studied programs are useful for improving health literacy in the elderly, especially about the empowerment of self-management of illnesses and the healthy habits. Many of them, however, agree on the need to increase the studied sample. Different types of programs have proved to be useful for improving knowledge. Only in two articles it is studied the increase of health literacy according to the gender variable and there is no significant difference. None of the studies reviewed in this research analyses the differences based on the improvement of health literacy depending on the suffered chronic illness. The included studies have a SIGN level of evidence between 1-, 2-, 2+ and 3. Conclusions: The studied educational programs improve health literacy levels of the elderly with chronic diseases but there is a lack of research and sustainability of this programs. The results of this review suggest that it is very important to continue investigating the best way to empower older people and that this acquired knowledge can be kept as long as possible