Aims: This study aims to describe health literacy for people at risk of type 2 diabetes and people with type 2 diabetes using the HLS-EU-Q12, and further examine the association between sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, well-being, overall health and quality of life, and health literacy.
Material and methods: We performed a cross-sectional study among 142 people at risk of type 2 diabetes and 75 people with type 2 diabetes from four primary care clinics in Norway. These data are baseline data from a randomized controlled trial which seeks to evaluate an interprofessional follow-up intervention. Multiple regression analysis was applied to explore associations to health literacy.
Results: Inadequate health literacy (sum score <33) was found among 30.2% of people at risk of type 2 diabetes and among 25.7% of people with type 2 diabetes. For people at risk of type 2 diabetes, higher level of education was significantly associated with higher health literacy. Better well-being and quality of life was significantly associated with higher health literacy for both groups.
Conclusions: The primary health care services should pay greater attention to assessing HL, well-being, and quality of life to facilitate the identification of people at risk of type 2 diabetes with insufficient self- management strategies to prevent or delay the development of manifest disease and its complications.
Copyright: © 2024 Vågenes et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.