To investigate the association between the health literacy and hand hygiene practices of the older adults to help them fight against infectious diseases in Hong Kong

Highlights

• Encourage older adults to form habits of using soap to wash hands to fight against infectious diseases.

• Older adults did not perform proper hand hygiene practice consistently was due to low health literacy.

• Encourage older adults to form habits of using soap to wash hands to fight against infectious diseases.

• It is effective to deliver simplifying and standardizing health information through video or audio mode to enhance older adults’ health literacy.

Background

Proper hand hygiene helps prevent infectious diseases, while health literacy plays a critical role in preventive health behaviors. It remains unclear as to why proper hand hygiene practices cannot be sustained and what role health literacy plays in older adults fight against infectious diseases.

Methods

A convenience sample of 433 old adults aged 65 and above was recruited. Their hygiene practices and health literacy were evaluated using a structured questionnaire adopted from the Centre for Health Protection and the Chinese version of the HLS-Asia-Q questionnaire.

Results

The percentage distribution of the hand hygiene performance, from always to never, was 18%-10%. A majority 63.28% (274) of them were classified as having inadequate health literacy (0-25), while a meager 1.62% (7) of them as having excellent health literacy (42.01-50). The Spearman correlation showed a significant positive relationship (P < 0.05) between the participants’ health literacy and their hand hygiene practices.

Conclusions

Health literacy and hand hygiene are positively related in helping the older adults fight against infectious diseases. To sustain proper hand hygiene practices is to provide frequent hand hygiene training to the older adults.