Joint Program of Family and Community
Medicine (JPFCM)Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Assessing the Level of Health Literacy Among
Adult Visitors in the Primary Health Care Sitting
Of National Guard Health Affair, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2010
:Researcher
Dr. Bander Khalid Alamari (MBBS)
Family Medicine Resident
:Supervisor

Dr. Badr Aljasir
Consultant Community Medicine Director, Preventive Medicine Centre, NG
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
:Advisor

Dr. Mohamad Alkwaari
Consultant Community Medicing
Qatar
A research submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Saudi Board in Family Medicine

Abstract
BACKGROUND: Health literacy is becoming as an increasing important worldwide. Thus, adapting and validating a tool
And investigating the burden of the health literacy in Saudi Arabia using such validated tool and deemed necessarily.
Therefore the objectives of this study are to validate an Arabic version of the short Test of Functional Health literacy in Adult(S-TOFHLT) as an instrument to measure the health literacy and TO determine the prevalence of inadequate health literacy among adult visitors and patients in the primary
Health care setting of National Guard health affair in Jeddah and the associated factors in 2010.

METHODS: a total of 205 visitors, aged (18 to 75 years) were randomly chosen from the primary health care setting of National Guard health affair in Jeddah, then health literacy level measured using a validated Arabic (S-TOFHLT).

RESULTS: This study showed that around 83.9%(n=172) of the primary health care visitors were categorized as (adequate literacy) while around 10.2%(n=21) were categorized as (marginal literacy) and 5.9%(n=12) of them in (inadequate literacy). It has been shown that there are significant association between the health literacy score and level of education (p=0.000) gender (p=0.010)and Internet usage (p=0.04) and the adjusted R square is (0.390)
CONCLUSION: Further studies need to be conducted regarding the health literacy in our Arabic community, not only describing the prevalence but also to understand the issue in more details and find out its relation with the patient behavior and the disease outcome.