The relationship between foot care behaviors and health literacy in patients witdiabetesh

Aim: This study was conducted to determine the relationship between foot care behaviors and health literacy in diabetic patients. Material and Method: The population of the descriptive and correlational study was the patients who applied to the Internal Medicine Outpatient Clinic of a hospital in Giresun Province, and the sample was the patients with diabetes who met the inclusion criteria. The study was carried out on 384 patients with diabetes between the 23rd of January 2024 and the 8th of November 2024. Data were collected by the researcher through face-to-face interviews using the "Personal Information Form", the "Foot Care Behavior Scale" and the "Health Literacy Scale in Adult Patients with Diabetes". Descriptive statistics, Student t test, Mann-Whitney U test, one-way ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman and Pearson correlation analysis were used to analyse the data. The level of statistical significance was accepted as p<0.05. Results: It was determined that diabetic patients received a total score of 55.41±10.80 from the FCBS, 14.95±5.00 from the Functional Health Literacy sub-dimension, 16.75±4.72 from the Communicative Health Literacy sub-dimension, 8.26±2.71 from the Critical Health Literacy sub-dimension and 39.96±6.64 from the Health Literacy Scale. There was a statistically significant positive and low-level relationship between the Health Literacy Scale total score and the FCBS total score (p<0.05). Conclusions: As a result of the study, it was determined that the mean score of diabetic patients on foot care behaviors was high, the mean score of functional health literacy sub-dimension was low, the mean score of interactive health literacy sub-dimension was high, and the mean score of critical health literacy sub-dimension was moderate. In addition, it was observed that as the total score of diabetic patients on the Health Literacy Scale increased, the total score of the FCBS also increased.