Functional Health Literacy among Undergraduate Pharmacy Students: A Cross-Sectional Study from Pakistan

Abstract

Most of the medical and pharmacy students will work as health professionals after graduation and will have more opportunities to interact with patients. Therefore, they should possess adequate health literacy levels to enhance the health literacy of the patients. Objective: The present study was designed to assess functional health literacy among undergraduate Pharm.D students studying at Hamdard University, Islamabad, Pakistan. Methodology: A descriptive cross-sectional study design was used. A pre-validated tool S. Tofhla was self-administered to a sample of 400 Pharm.D students of Hamdard University, Islamabad, Pakistan. After data collection, data was cleaned coded and entered in SPSS version 21.0. Descriptive statistics comprising of frequency and percentages was calculated. The non-parametric tests including Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Walis (p≥0.05) were performed to find out the difference among different variables. Results: The results highlighted that female students had higher scores of functional health literacy (29.03, ±4.14). Undergraduate students living in urban settings (28.69, ±4.66) had high functional health literacy scores than students living in rural areas (26.46, ±6.48). Students having English language as medium of instruction during their schooling had better scores (28.53, ±5.11) than students having Urdu language as medium of instruction in high school. Conclusion: The results of the present study concluded that the level of functional health literacy among undergraduate pharmacy students was adequate. High level of health literacy is required to assist pharmacists to manage self-care activities, and the care of their patients, future research should be designed to explore whether improved health literacy amongst pharmacists transforms into improved self-care and better patient outcomes.