A comparative analysis of the educational effectiveness of leaflet and website for low-literate patients - A case study of immigrant mothers in Taipei

Abstract

Low health literacy has been associated with poor outcomes in health care. Recent research suggests that good health educational material can help to reduce the literacy barrier and enhance health outcome. Immigrant populations are vulnerable to serious health disparities, and language barriers may further exacerbate their limited health literacy in accessing health care information. Yet, ways to help low-literacy parents to look after their children by applying health educational material are still at an early stage of development. The purpose of this study is to compare the educational effectiveness of leaflet and website to deliver knowledge related to children allergy healthcare for immigrant mothers with low literacy, thus establishing design guidelines of health educational materials for low-literate patients. The study was implemented in five stages, including a focus group interview, the development of testing media, a reliability and validity test, a pre-post knowledge test, and a usability survey.The findings revealed the problems low-literate patients usually encountered at the clinic, the pediatric information they most needed, the way they were able to acquire knowledge of children's healthcare, and the media they usually used to access information. Moreover, the results demonstrated that the leaflet intervention, as well as the website intervention, had a positive outcome. However, there was no significant difference between the influence of design intervention made by the leaflet and by the website. The findings also showed that the criteria used by low-literate patients to evaluate health educational material could be analyzed in terms of the quality of information, presentation, and appeal. An assessment checklist related to the design of health educational materials for low-literate patients was also listed. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.