Health literacy in low-and middle-income countries: A systematic review

Abstract

Health literacy (HL) is linked to individual capacities of access, understanding, assessment and application of health information to make decisions in everyday life, in order to main-tain or improve health. The scope of this article is to review studies on HL conducted in low-and middle-income countries, with an emphasis on the definition used for HL. It involved a systematic search in the Medline, Embase, Scopus, LI-LACS and SciELO databases. It included studies that showed the definition of HL, studies in countries with low-and middle-income economies and Latin American studies. Initially, a selection of studies was made by reading the titles and/or abstracts. Two independent evaluators conducted the reading of the full text. Disagreements were discussed by consensus. A total of 6,025 referen-ces were located and 36 were selected for the final sample. Most studies (58.3%) were from countries on the Asian continent, followed by studies from South American countries (27.8%), inclu-ding Brazil. Most studies (58.3%) evaluated the functional dimension of the HL (FHL). The most frequent definitions were from the Institute of Medicine and from the World Health Organization. Approximately 30% of the studies that evaluated FHL used broader definitions of HL as theoretical frameworks.