Christopher Le's doctoral project examines various aspects of health literacy among young people aged 16–25 in Norway.
The findings are not particularly encouraging and may have negative consequences for these young individuals.
– High general health literacy is important for health-related quality of life and can lead to a reduced number of visits to general practitioners, and good ability to use digital health services or digital health literacy can lead to reduced specialist visits, says Le.
He further states that digital health literacy plays an important role in young people's ability to navigate the healthcare system, while it has been revealed that the ability to use digital health services varies significantly between age groups, genders, and education levels.
– Overall, this research helps to close the knowledge gap related to health literacy among young people. Additionally, this doctoral work introduces several quality-assured measurement instruments while calling for a new approach to measuring health literacy in relation to today's digital transformation of health services, according to Christopher Le.
The study concludes that organisational health literacy or health literacy-friendly health services can help improve young people's digital and health literacy.
The findings provide new insights and can contribute to shaping future strategy development, practice, and research in health literacy.
The title of Christopher Le's dissertation is: Digital and Health Literacy in Young People Aged 16-25: A Secondary Analysis of HSL19Data Collected in Norway.
Main findings in the doctoral work:
- There is a certain extent of social gradient for health literacy among young people in Norway.
- All types of health literacy examined have varying degrees of positive impact on the use of healthcare services.
- The majority of young people in Norway lack several key skills that might be expected of them as users within the patient-centered approach to healthcare.
- Young people in Norway struggle with inadequate digital health literacy, and some have difficulty accessing quality health information digitally.
- Young people’s general health literacy is positively associated with health-related quality of life and negatively associated with GP-visits
- Digital health literacy is positively associated with young people’s ability to navigate the healthcare system
- Young people’s ability to utilise digital health services is negatively associated with the number of specialist visits.