Health literacy among elected leaders of municipalities in Nawalparasi west.

Thesis Report.

SUMMARY:

Health Literacy is defined as the people’s knowledge, motivation, and competencies to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information in order to make judgments and take decisions in everyday life concerning health care, disease prevention and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life throughout the course of life. It has been shown that health literacy improves self-care, produces better health outcomes, and lowers health costs. After federalism, the executive body of local government is highly responsible in taking major decisions of allocating budget and formulating laws, policies and standards related to the upliftment of overall health. It requires adequate systemic response and capacity to mainstream the concept of health literacy in national health system, for which policy makers must have adequate knowledge on health literacy and must possess higher degree of health literacy. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the level of health literacy among elected leaders of municipalities in Nawalparasi West.
It was a descriptive cross-sectional study employing quantitative research methods. Data was collected according to the structured questionnaire through face-to-face interview with sample of 206. However, 192 respondents have completed the interview. Data was collected in 4 different municipalities of Nawalparasi West. It was then entered and cleaned in Microsoft excel and was analyzed in SPPS IBM version 25. Sociodemographic characteristics of respondents like age, sex, religion, ethnicity, education level and occupation of respondents were collected. Descriptive analysis was used to summarize socio-demographic characteristics and binary logistical regression and multivariate logistic regression modeling was used to identify factors influencing Health Literacy level. The elected leaders including ward chairperson, female ward members, dalit female ward members and ward members were only included in the study.
38% of total respondents were ward members and nearly half of the respondents were of age group 25 to 44 years old. 68.2% of respondents have done schooling ranging up to secondary level of education. 36.5% have been involved in agriculture. 62.5% have participated in any kind of health training. 55.2% have self-rated their health status as unsatisfactory whereas 42.7% self-rated their self-esteem as high self-esteem. 55.2% had adequate health literacy including 23.4% having excellent health literacy. Bi-variate and multi-variate logistic regression was done using binary logistic regression. Respondents with no schooling were more than 2.5 times and 8.4 times less likely to have adequate health literacy in comparison to those with schooling range from basic to secondary (AOR=2.690, CI:0.839-8.628) and who have educational status of bachelors and above (AOR=8.498, CI:1.017-71.020) respectively. Similarly, respondents with low perceived self esteem were about 8 times and 6.5 times less likely to have adequate health literacy in comparison to those with medium (AOR=7.930, CI:2.707-23.23) and high (AOR=6.475, CI:2.201-19.047) perceived self esteem respectively. Hence, this study showed that perceived self esteem and education were factors significantly affecting health literacy among elected leaders. Hence to increase the meaningful participation of policy makers in sector of health and to encourage leaders to be conscious about the population health, it is important to design intervention on increment of health literacy level of decision makers along with general population.