Health Literacy in patients with acute cerebral ischemic disease and organisational health literacy of a stroke-unit

• Applicant: Dr. Marianne Hahn
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine ; Clinical Neurology; Neurosurgery and Neuroradiology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 533621552

Background: More than 260,000 patients are treated in specialised stroke-units due to diagnosis of acute cerebral ischemia in Germany every year. With discharge from the stroke-unit, secondary preventive measures, such as medication therapies and life style changes are recommended, which have proven to reduce the risk of recurrent stroke or further complications of cerebrovascular disease (CVD). Health literacy (HL) describes a person’s knowledge, motivation and ability to find, understand and apply general or disease-specific health information to maintain or improve quality of life and has been shown to contribute to compliance with secondary preventive measures in CVD. HL is influenced by patient-individual factors (individual HL) and context factors of social environment and health care. In this sense, also health care providers have been attributed responsibility to support individuals to make health-literate decisions (organizational HL). Little is known about the disease-specific HL of patients in Germany with acute cerebral ischemia at the point of discharge from the acute care hospital. Aims: The research project aims to, 1) assess the disease-specific HL in patients with acute cerebral ischemia at the point of discharge from the stroke-unit and identify factors associated with low HL, 2) assess the health information seeking behavior and preferences in this patient group and to 3) assess the patients‘ perspective on organizational HL of a stroke-unit. Study design: An explorative cross-sectional study is conducted among n=150 patients with acute cerebral ischemia at the point of discharge from a stroke-unit. The study generates primary data by questionnaire-based assessment of general and disease-specific HL, patients’ perception of own cardiovascular risk-profile, self-management, health information seeking behavior and patients’ perspective on health literacy-sensitive communication (as part of organizational HL of a stroke-unit) with validated and adjusted assessment tools. In addition, clinical parameters are extracted from patient charts. Outlook: HL contributes to patient-empowerment and is therefore an important aspect of patient-centered health care in secondary prevention of acute cerebral ischemic disease. The results of the proposed study enable (1) to identify patients with acute cerebral ischemia, who have low HL, and develop target-group-specific interventions to improve disease-specific HL as well as (2) to evaluate the potential to increase the organizational HL of a stroke-unit.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Klaus Gröschel; Professor Dr. Timo Uphaus