The impact of health literacy levels on Emergency Service use by adult individuals

Low level of health literacy, which is critical for the society as well as for the individual; inadequate access to preventive health services, inability to benefit enough from early screening programs, inability to manage chronic diseases well, it can lead to negative consequences such as an increase in health costs due to the increase in unnecessary applications to the emergency room. The aim of this thesis study; to examine the effect of health literacy level of individuals on emergency service use. The study of cross-sectional type Dr University of Health Sciences. Abdurrahman Yurtaslan participated in 404 volunteers applying to the Emergency Service of Ankara Oncology Training and Research Hospital. Data were collected through "Socio-demographic Properties Information Form" and "Turkey Health Literacy Scale-32 (TSOY-32)". Data; independent groups t-test, one-way variance analysis (ANOVA), LSD multi-comparison method, evaluated through the analysis of dorsal regression. Statistical analyses were examined at p<0.05 significance level. The average age of the participants is 35,02±11,79 and 55.4% are female and 56.7% are single. The average TSOY-32 score of the participants is 33,06±10,09 and 34,33±9,72 for treatment and service sub-size, 31,75±11,51' for disease prevention and health promotion sub-size. In treatment and service size; information retrieval sub-size average 35,68±10,86 (enough), knowledge understanding sub-size average 34,26±11,23 (enough), information evaluation sub-size average 31,49±10,76 (limited/the average problematic) and lower size of using information was obtained as 35,83±10,83 (enough). Health literacy levels of the participants; education, occupation, the place where the longest lived, health perception, the presence of chronic disease, the duration of the current complaint, the status of contact with the family physician for the current complaint, the, the situation of applying to another emergency department within the last 24 hours for the current complaint varies according to the frequency of application to the emergency department within the last 6 months. The current complaint period, the regression model established according to the effect of the family physician application for the current complaint and the last 24 hours of emergency application for the present complaint on the general health literacy level of the participants makes sense in line with the results obtained studies to increase health literacy should be planned. It is recommended to carry out studies on planning health services and processing of the referral chain by preventing unnecessary use of emergency services by individuals to benefit primarily from family health centers.