Health literacy in the urban health infrastructure: who maintains healthcare and how

Abstract

Today we may witness a dire need to research how the urban environment influences urban health, well-being, and sustainability of local communities. The issue of urban health is closely connected with disease prevention projects and the integration of new preventive medical approaches with educational technologies. Due to a large number of responsible parties for the development of health literacy under the authority of different establishments, there is a problem to coordinate aligned activities. Thus the research of the healthcare institutions actions in health literacy development is extremely relevant. The objective of this research is to carry out an integral assessment of the degree to which the functions of preventing non-communicable diseases and developing health literacy are fulfilled by the sectors responsible for urban healthcare. The methods used in this research include a two-phase expert survey: the first group of experts (n: 24) selected the key aspects of healthcare activities, and the second group of experts (n: 35) assessed the quality of implementation of tasks by institutions in charge of disease prevention. The major problem is the lack of effective communication mechanisms in the sphere of intersectoral cooperation, informing the key disease prevention bodies of distributed responsibility, as well as state and social control of execution of laws and regulations. According to the obtained results, the state healthcare system is an important component of the health infrastructure. The functions connected with meeting the vital needs of the city population received medium-high ratings. However, the implementation of disease prevention functions by the healthcare system in Moscow was rated by experts at a low level. Besides, the experts consistently assigned an extremely low rating to the development of health literacy as one of the areas of activity covered by all sectors. To reinforce their outreach and awareness-raising work in the sphere of healthcare, executors of federal projects have to incorporate educational activities into their daily work.