Health Literacy Assessment in Community Service Users

Data from the administration of Version 1 of the HLQ in the initial phase of a large multi-centre service improvement trial, the Ophelia (OPtimising HEalth LIteracy and Access) project [9 (link)] were used. The data were provided by 813 clients of 8 diverse community-based agencies in Victoria, Australia who were administered the HLQ during the needs assessment stage of the project. The settings and questionnaire respondents who were recruited for the study are described in detail elsewhere [9 (link), 10 (link)]. Briefly, 8 organisations providing Home and Community Care (HACC) services, Hospital Admission Risk Programs (HARP) or community nursing and other chronic disease services from 4 of 8 Department of Health (now Department of Health and Human Services) regions in Victoria were invited to participate in the Ophelia project through an expression of interest process. The respondents comprised people attending one of these 8 participating organisations. Each organisation selected a target group of clients based on a service-provision priority. The majority of the participants were expected to have a chronic health condition although this was not a pre-requisite for inclusion. Trained staff from each organisation collected data from a representative sample of clients within their target group using consecutive methods of recruitment where feasible and employing various strategies for recruiting clients who are traditionally ‘harder to reach’. Selection criteria required that participants should be cognitively able to provide informed consent to participate, and be over the age of 18 years.
Numbers in the selected organisations available for data analysis were:

A Melbourne metropolitan municipal community service = 102 cases;

A rural coastal community health service = 70;

A regional city case management service for chronic and complex clients = 132;

A Melbourne metropolitan community health service = 90;

A Melbourne outer metropolitan community health service = 108;

A Melbourne outer metropolitan municipal community service = 97;

A regional community health service = 99;

A Melbourne metropolitan domiciliary nursing service = 115.