Pilot Study of ILIADE: Exploring Health Literacy Within Patients Hospitalized for Acute Cardiovascular Events

Health literacy (HL) is the ability to access, understand, evaluate and apply information in order to communicate with health professionals and understand health instructions but also, promote, maintain and improve health throughout life. Health literacy is known as a health determinant. An association has been shown between low health literacy and low health outcomes such as increased number of unscheduled hospitalization or emergency visits, low medication adherence and poor health status.

These have been particularly demonstrated with cardiovascular diseases, which combine risk factors (emergency hospitalization, reduction in the length of hospital stays, and complex secondary preventive drug treatments). Despite many scientific international literature about health literacy and health outcomes, no information is available in France on the prevalence of low health literacy level of patients, notably cardiovascular patients. The investigating team's hypothesis is that knowing the prevalence of low HL levels in cardiovascular patients would help to better tailored a communication intervention dedicated to the needs of these low-HL patients with the final aim of increasing their adhesion to preventive drugs and behavioural recommendations.

The first aim of the present study is to estimate the prevalence of low HL level among patients discharged after acute myocardial infarction or acute decompensation of chronic heart failure. Secondary aims are to assess factors associated with the level of HL and identify barriers and facilitators of low HL patients to understand medical information on their disease. The results of this study will guide the design of the intervention of an interventional study on HL of cardiovascular patients.