Study protocol
Health literacy is related to literacy and entails people’s knowledge, motivation and competences to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information in order to make judgments and take decisions in everyday life concerning healthcare, disease prevention and health promotion to maintain or improve quality of life during the life course (Sørensen et al., 2012). In the surgical context limited health literacy can contribute to a higher risk for surgical site infections (Theiss et al., 2022), postoperative complications (Qin, Jin, Min, Wang, & Shen, 2022; Theiss et al., 2022) and longer lengths of stay (Qin et al., 2022). Also, limited health literacy was associated with poorer postoperative recovery process in day surgical patients (Halleberg Nyman, Nilsson, Dahlberg, & Jaensson, 2018).Research about prevalence of health literacy and consequences for the individual and society is quite extensive. But there is a paucity in research that investigates interventions that promotes health literacy and can be effective to use for a surgical setting (Chang et al., 2020).
Objectives
1. To describe interventions that promote health literacy in surgical settings.
2. To identify knowledge gaps for future research.