Abstract
Health literacy was examined in Chile to assess whether it is homogenous enough to allow the use of “templates” for informed consent, and to identity subgroups that may need special consideration when recruited for research because of their low health literacy abbreviated SAHLSA test of health literacy was used. Results were expressed as percent of correct answers out of the 50 items of the SAHLSA test. There was high health literacy with 85.4 ± 13.5 % (arithmetic mean ± standard deviation, n=762) of correct answers. There were important differences between groups, with lower scores in artisanal fishermen families
and high-school students attending public schools, and higher scores in university students and mothers attending the public health system. Results show that a case by case approach is probably more appropriate when seeking informed consent in this population because of the variability of health literacy.
