246 SUMMARY Patients with limited health literacy (LHL) have worse health outcomes, poorer treatment knowledge, and more difficulties in their self-management and communication with healthcare professionals. Health literacy is defined as the ability to access, understand, appraise and communicate information to engage with the demands of different health contexts to promote and maintain good health across the life course. Healthcare professionals face challenges in identifying, informing and supporting patients with LHL in their selfmanagement. Despite this evidence, LHL is often inadequately addressed in both prevention and clinical care. Optimizing the care for patients with LHL is a promising strategy to intervene upon the growing impact of chronic kidney disease (CKD) across the globe. Over the past decades, there has been an increase in the number of patients with CKD, with its current occurrence affecting 10 to 15% of all adults globally. This has a high impact, both for the patients concerned, and for society, for example due to its high costs. Improving the patients’ self-management of health behaviors is key to prevent the onset of CKD as well as further kidney decline, yet patients find this disease complex and burdensome to manage. This research is the first to develop and test a multi-component health literacy intervention targeting both CKD patients with LHL and professionals. With this intervention, we aimed to optimize self-management of CKD patients with LHL, and to strengthen communication between these patients and their health care professionals. This main aim led to the following specific study aims: • To summarize the evidence on patient- and system-level factors potentially mediating the relation between LHL and health outcomes, and on the effectiveness of health literacy interventions customized to CKD patients (Chapter 2). • To explore experiences with and barriers for self-management, from the perspectives of both CKD patients with LHL and health care professionals (Chapter 3).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw