Health Literacy and Health Behaviour under One Health Approach in Tanzania: Connecting the Connected or Connecting the Unconnected?

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Date

2020-10-10

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Abstract

Globally, health literacy (HL) has been reported to stand as a driver to health behavioural changes. Despite efforts to educate people to enhance the knowledge and skills on health-related matters to improve health literacy, consequently enabling and encouraging individuals to make healthier lifestyle choices, sometimes, there has been notable health impairing behaviours. Definitely, in such circumstances, HL by itself has been observed to fail to drive such behavioural changes. This assumes that there are drivers together with or beyond HL towards behavioural changes. This cross-sectional study assessed HL and its influence on health behaviour (HB) under One Health Approach in Morogoro, Tanzania. A structured questionnaire was employed for data collection from 1440 respondents acquired through a multistage sampling procedure. A tool was developed to assess HL, an index of score gauged HB, and Likert scale was used to assess attitudes towards HB. Data were analyzed using IBM-SPSS v20 software. The study revealed, about one-third of the respondents (32.9%) had adequate HL, (30.8%) moderate HL and (36.3%) with inadequate HL; 40% had health-enhancing behaviours and 60% with health impairing behaviours. A significant association (health literacy*health behaviour, p=0.000; was observed. The results further revealed that 30% had unfavourable attitudes towards health impairing behaviours, and attitude was significantly found to associate with behaviours (p=0.000). It is concluded that attitudes towards health impairing behaviours affect the way HL can influence HB. This study recommends strengthening efforts to enhance health information dissemination through health education focusing on culture as the context that informs behaviours.

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Health Literacy, One Health Approach, Health Behaviour, Tanzania

Citation

Muhanga, M.I.(2020).Health Literacy and Health Behaviour under One Health Approach in Tanzania: Connecting the Connected or Connecting the Unconnected?East African Journal of Social and Applied Sciences,2(2), 124-137.