Health literacy among older adults: Exploring older people´s prerequisites for understanding health information and making informed health choices.

Research problems: The Swedish healthcare system has become very specialised and is often experienced as fragmented and lacking coordination between caregivers. Advanced age is associated with multi-morbidity, which usually requires care from several different caregivers. This makes older people vulnerable to fragmentated care and lack of care coordination.

Health literacy (HL) is an essential component of an individual’s ability to gain access to, understand and use information to improve and maintain good health and is an important prerequisite for managing health and care needs.

Therefore, knowledge on older people’s HL is vital to efficiently and equitably meet the care needs of the rapidly aging population.Specific questions: The project aim is to gain knowledge on HL in the older population.

In this project we will assess to what degree the older population in Sweden is health literate, identify groups that might face challenges due to inadequate HL and explore what older people experience as prerequisites for understanding health information and managing their health and care needs as well as communicate with caregivers.Data and Methods: This project combines both qualitative and quantitative data.

The Swedish Panel Study of Living Conditions of the Oldest Old (SWEOLD), linked with register data on healthcare utilisation will allow for measuring the level of health literacy in a nationally representative sample of the Swedish population aged 77-years and over.

Semi-structured interviews with older people will be performed to deepen the understanding of contextual barriers and facilitators, and individual internal and external resources to make informed decisions about their health and care needs.

Plan for project realisation: The collection of SWEOLD data is in progress and preliminary analyses on a sub-sample have been performed.

Information about HL, life situation, health, care utilisation, physical and cognitive ability and social support from relatives are being collected.

The project group has extensive knowledge about older adults, health literacy, the health and social care system as well as relevant research methodology, both qualitative and quantitative.Relevance: Knowledge on HL among the older population can be used to tailor communication and directing support to vulnerable groups in order to achieve an efficient and equitable health and social care system, as well as supporting older people in health crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic.