Health Literacy
Prevalence Survey of Health Conditions and Health Literacy Among Junior High School and Senior High School Students in Selected Provinces in the Philippines: Instrument Development
Health literacy (HL) is defined as the knowledge, motivation, and competencies that enable people to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information when making decisions concerning health care, disease prevention, and health promotion. Increasing HL is a key strategy in the Philippine government’s efforts to improve health outcomes, reduce health inequities, and achieve universal health care. While there is growing emphasis on the need to promote HL across all population groups, the current state of health literacy in the Philippines, especially among school children, remains underexplored. The nationwide prevalence of limited HL among Filipino adults is known; however, there is a notable research gap concerning the HL status of children, and there is no locally validated HL instrument designed for high school students.
The Institute of Child Health and Human Development, in collaboration with the College of Public Health at the University of the Philippines Manila, with funding from the Department of Health (DOH), is conducting a study on the prevalence of health literacy and health conditions among junior and senior high school students in the Philippines.
The study has two phases: Phase 1 is instrument development and Phase 2 is the survey on health literacy and health conditions affecting junior and senior high school students.
Phase 1
General Objective: To develop an instrument to measure the level of health literacy among junior and senior high school students in the Philippines.
Specific Objectives:
To determine the applicable domains and dimensions of health literacy.
To determine the face and content validity of the adapted instrument.
To determine the clarity of the adapted instrument through cognitive pretesting among experts and a subset of the target population.
A Consensus-Building Workshop (March 12, 2025) and Expert-Driven Pretesting (March 20, 2025) were conducted with experts in health literacy, health promotion, ambulatory pediatrics, adolescent medicine, education, and child psychology from the Department of Health, Department of Education, UPM College of Public Health, UP Department of Education, UP Integrated School, University of Santo Tomas Senior High School, Philippine General Hospital Division of Adolescent Medicine, and Society of Adolescent Medicine in the Philippines, Inc.
