Donate Now
  • What We've Learned
A New Method to Measure Health Literacy
Everyday-Living-8.0-1
Scientific Study Title:
Development and Validation of a Canadian Health Literacy (HL) Measurement Tool for Chronic Airways Disease Management
Start Date:
  • 2015
End Date:
  • 2022
Research Category
Tags

Why did we do this research?

Health Literacy (HL) is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, understand, and communicate basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. Low levels of HL have a strong impact on population health. Low HL is associated with:

  • increased hospitalizations
  • greater emergency care use
  • poorer ability to take medications appropriately or follow disease treatment
  • poorer ability to interpret labels and health messages
  • poorer overall health status
  • higher mortality
  • Health Literacy is crucial for people to make informed health-related decisions, especially for those managing chronic conditions like asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). This research aimed to create a new tool to check how well people can do different everyday activities, like shopping or cooking, when they have chronic respiratory conditions. The goal is to help these people take care of their chronic respiratory conditions more effectively.
  • What Did We Do?
  • We took several steps to create this new health literacy tool. Initially, we conducted a thorough review to identify the drawbacks of existing health literacy tools. Next, we organized several focus group sessions involving asthma and COPD patients who spoke either French or English from different regions in Canada. We also held interviews with key informants, including policymakers, clinicians, health literacy researchers, and respiratory physicians from Canada and abroad. Finally, we assembled a global HL expert advisory board to share their knowledge and experiences with our researchers about this innovative HL measurement tool. This collaboration between scientific, practice, and policy informants helped us create a tool that covers nine essential chronic Airways self-management topics. We then engaged patients and their caregivers to help us develop scenarios and scripts of our HL tool that was then tested with patients and key informants across Canada, refining it based on their feedback to ensure it was relevant, clear, and appropriately challenging.
  • We also assessed the validity of our developed tool, the Vancouver Airways Health Literacy Tool (VAHLT), by exploring its relationship with patient characteristics in individuals with chronic airways disease (CAD) with 1000 CAD patients in BC and five other provinces in Canada.

The Research Team

Principle Investigator

  • Dr. Mark Fitzgerald, Head of the UBC
  • Respiratory Division and co-Director of UBC Institute for Heart and Lung

Co-Principal Investigator

  • Jacek Kopec, MD, MSc, PhD, Senior Scientist Emeritus, Epidemiology, Arthritis Research Canada (University of British Columbia)

Co-Investigators

  • Shawn Aaron, Céline Bergeron, Louis-Philippe Boulet, Jean Bourbeau, Roger S Goldstein, Samir Gupta, Nadia Ahmed Khan, Darcy Marciniuk, Laura Nimmon, Mohammad-Iraj Poureslami, Irving Rootman, Richard Sawatzky, Wan Tan

Project manager and co-investigator

  • Dr. Mohammad-Iraj Poureslami, Senior Health
  • Evaluation Scientist, Faculty of Medicine, Respiratory Division, (University of British Columbia)

Who Funded This Research?

Canadian Institutes of Health Research

How Can People Get Involved?

We used a patient participatory approach that engaged French and English-speaking patients with the most commonly occurring respiratory diseases: COPD and asthma.

Media and Infographics

Related Research

What We're Working On Right Now

Exploring a New Immune Cell Therapy for People with Autoimmune Diseases

Systemic sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus are serious autoimmune diseases that can cause damage to many organs including the skin, lungs and kidneys. In this project, we will study a new type of treatment that may better control these diseases by targeting the immune cells that cause them. If successful, it could reduce inflammation, slow or stop disease progression, and may even help reset the immune system, so that some patients no longer need long-term immune-suppressing medications.
Read More

Understanding how scleroderma affects people over time

People living with scleroderma experience challenges such as pain, disability, and mental health concerns, but we still don’t know much about how these problems change over time or why some people do better than others. For this research project, our goal is to improve our understanding of how scleroderma affects people’s daily lives and identify factors that may predict changes in their health.
Read More

How can we help Canadians age at home to improve health outcomes and support a sustainable healthcare system?

As Canada’s population ages, home care is important for helping older adults remain safely within their homes. Our research team is linking data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging with health records in British Columbia, Ontario, and New Brunswick, to track patterns of paid and unpaid home care use over time.
Read More