Nutrition Healthy literacy of cancer patients, carers and HCP
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Implications of health literacy on the understanding, accessibility and engagement with nutrition information of cancer patients and their support networks during cancer treatment.
IRAS ID
253248
Contact name
Laura J Miller
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Nottingham Univeristy Hospitals
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 24 days
Research summary
Research Summary:
Nutrition describes the substances that you take into your body and how they influence health. It plays a key role in both the development of cancer and in a cancer patients fitness during treatment. Being overweight or obese is associated with the development of up to 11 different types of cancer and malnutrition is associated with poorer treatment outcomes and greater complications. It is therefore important that patients and the people that care for them are supported to get access to, understand and use nutrition information during cancer treatment.In the UK 43% of working age adults are unable to understand current health information and this worsens to 61% when numbers are added to the information. This ability to access, use and understand health information is known as health literacy.
Our study aims to explore the nutrition health literacy of cancer patients and their support network through two surveys. The first survey will use a tool from America that has been shown to measure understanding of nutrition information. We will adapt this tool using consensus groups to be used in the UK and test it by measuring nutrition literacy of cancer patients and the people who help them understand and use their information; friends, family and health care professionals.
The second survey will help us to understand in more detail how cancer patients and their friends/family are supported to find information about nutrition during cancer treatment. Where they get their nutrition information, how confident they are in that information and their knowledge or skills to use that information. The information participants provide will help us to understand if certain groups have more challenges than others.
Together these surveys will help us to improve how & when nutrition information is given, what it looks like, ultimately making nutrition more accessible to more cancer patients.
Summary of Results:
We spoke to 8 topic experts and conducted 2 focus groups with 16 service users. Types of changes they suggested including testing a shorter version of the NL tool, changing some of the US language (e.g. measures and names), updating images and adding UK food labels. We then tested the new NLit-UK tool in 42 people with cancer (we had aimed to capture information from 366 but had to close the study early due to COVID). We did statistical tests to check if the NLit-UK tool and the questions included were reliable and valid (likely to measure the same things each time). We found that the longer version of the tool (63-item) and shorter version of the tool (42-item) measures were reliable and valid. We did want to do some extra checks on the performance of NLit-UK but were not able to due to the small sample size.Conclusion
NLit-UK tool is a valid and reliable measure of NL and could be used in people with cancer to provide information on how to improve nutrition education and information. However, it would be beneficial to check this in a larger sample.REC name
West Midlands - South Birmingham Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/WM/0026
Date of REC Opinion
12 Feb 2019
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion