A survey on how older adults access medical and health information and what kinds of problems they face in accessing it

Abstract

  This study aims to reveal the actual situations on how Japanese older adults access medical and health information and on what kinds of problems they have in the course of doing so. We distributed 650 questionnaires by mail through community-job-centers to older adults in Tokyo and Nagano, to which 521 people responded. Major findings are as follows: The more they were able to access a wide range of health-related information, the higher they evaluated their subjective health status. Major source of information was not the internet. Rather, they gathered information through TV, friends and family, and the newspaper. The regional difference was observed only in accessing media. Multiple regression analyses showed the degree to which they accessed information was accounted for by the Health Information Orientation and eHealth Literacy scores, mostly independent of basic demographic factors. Older adults had various complaints in obtaining and understanding health-related information. The less the degree to which older adults accessed information, the more they complained about not knowing where to obtain the information. These results suggest that further research is necessary to elucidate the cause of their problems in obtaining and comprehending health-related information in more specifically defined medical and health-related situations.