Measuring health literacy in Europe

One of the aims of the European Health Literacy project is to develop a tool to measure health literacy in Europe. In order reach this objective the following steps are carried out:

• Literature review of definitions, concepts and existing tools.
• Development of a conceptual model as foundation for the survey.
• Delphi procedure facilitating the questionnaire development
• Focus groups testing the questionnaire in Greece, Ireland and the Netherlands
• Pilot interviews testing the questionnaire in Ireland and the Netherlands
• Stakeholder review to make the final adjustments to the questionnaire
• Translation to local languages
• Official versions confirmed of the questionnaire HLS-EU-Q to be used in the European Health Literacy Survey.

The European Health Literacy Survey

The survey was conducted in July 2011 by TNS in all countries participating in the project, thus Austria, Bulgaria, Germany NRW, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

Data analysis is being performed by the consortium partner from Austria, Professor J. Pelikan from Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Vienna.

The survey results will be launched at the European Health Literacy Conference 22-23 November 2011 in Brussels (more info: Events)

A report on the results are available spring 2012.