Ageing and health literacy

Background:
Older people are more likely to have poorer health literacy skills, experience more health problems and worse health outcomes compared to younger people.

Aims:
The aim of the study was to explore whether age differences between older people’s and younger people’s performance on a health literacy task would reduce with multimodal health information, presented by video, compared with unimodal information presented by audio and text on its own.

Method:
24 older adults and 25 younger adults completed a test predictive of intelligence and an experimental task where they were shown information about health conditions presented by video, audio and text and then asked forced-choice questions on its content. Older adults also completed a cognitive screening test.

Results:
No significant differences in performance between the age groups were found for video stimuli presentation. Conversely, older adults performed significantly worse than younger participants when shown the audio and text-based stimuli in isolation. The pattern of findings suggests the older group benefited more than the younger group from video stimuli.

Conclusions and implications:
Older people may benefit more from receiving multimodal health-improving information. Clinicians have a responsibility to communicate health advice in ways most accessible to the older population. Additional work is needed to further investigate how presenting health information to more than one sensory channel could improve older people’s health literacy and health outcomes.