Evaluation of SASUK OON-CHAI, a Supportive Process for Organizational Health Literacy Improvement for Government Health Care Units

Abstract

Organizational health literacy [OHL] helps health care organizations achieve high-quality, efficient, and meaningful care to service users, called health literate health care organizations [HLO]. OHL is defined by the Institute of Medicine as “the degree to which an organization implements policies, practices, and systems that make it easier for people to navigate, understand, and use information and its services to take care of their health.” As OHL was a new term in Thailand, there were needs to raise awareness and promote OHL practices at governmental health care organizations. This study was to evaluate the effect of “SASUK OON-CHAI”, a supportive web-based processes for OHL at governmental health care organizations under the Ministry of Public Health. The supportive processes were initiated by the Division of Health Literacy and Health Communication, Department of Health. An evaluative study design was employed to investigate the effects of SASUK OON-CHAI on OHL of governmental health care organizations that registered to participate in interactive online monthly meetings (group 1) and compared with organizations voluntarily chose to self-study the OHL (group 2). The OHL practices were reflected by the staff and service users before and after each health care organization developed and submitted their development plans. The percentages of staff and service users who perceived the OHL practices were compared between the pre-test and post-test using the Wilcoxon signed rank test, and between the two groups using the Mann-Whitney U test. The significance level is .05. Cohen’s D was calculated to indicate the effect size. Results: 455 organizations assessed their OHL practices at least twice with a minimum time interval of one month and their OHL practices were used for the evaluation. 248 chose to participate in the interactive online monthly meetings and 207 chose to self-study. There were statistically significant improvements in the OHL practices of both groups with a small effect size [group 1: pre-test 95.47%, SD = 5.99, post-test 96.95%, SD = 5.51, p = 0.000; group 2: pre-test 96.61%, SD = 6.77, post-test 97.83%, SD = 4.01, p = 0.002). At the pre-test, group 1 had a significantly lower percentage of the OHL practices (p = 0.000), but at the post-test, this percentage was not statistically different from that of group 2 (p = 0.139). Conclusion: Either OHL practices by registering in SASUK OON-CHAI and participating monthly online meetings or self-studying the OHL practices helped improve OHL.