Conditions of functional health literacy of an elderly diabetics group.

OBJECTIVE to evaluate the conditions of functional health literacy of an elderly diabetics group. METHOD cross-sectional and descriptive study, with diabetic's elderly assisted in the SUS (N = 114). The social and health conditions were evaluated as well as functional health literacy by S-TOFHLA test (short version); the simple proportions, average, standard deviation and Pearson's Chi-square were described by SPSS software (20.0) with α = 5% value. RESULTS the mean age was 67.4 years, 74.0% of the elderly were women, had up to four years of schooling; 29.8% had a long-standing illness, 64.0% reported having high blood pressure, 47.4% smoke or were smokers, 73.7% had low functional health literacy, which was associated with schooling p = 0.001. CONCLUSIONS the low functional health literacy could be a self-care conditioning and can be influenced by low schooling because it implies to have skills to understand and make decisions aimed at self-management of health.