The tool was developed in the asthma context because this chronic
condition poses high demands on patients’ self-care routines. Patients
need to follow strict medical regimens, use medicines properly, avoid
asthma triggers, and recognize symptoms. However, if asthma health
information is not properly understood and integrated by patients, a
proper asthma control is difficult to achieve, which is at the end the
final purpose for managing this condition. Therefore, the characteristics
present in asthma self-management make it an appropriate condition
to develop and test the proposed judgment skills. In addition to
this, it has been pointed out by other authors that health literacy skills
should involve more content-specific skills and health-related knowledge
that depends on the health condition.7 Thus it is crucial to devel-
Significance for public health
Patients’ health literacy has a great impact on their health behaviours and
their health outcomes. Therefore, it has become more and more common to
measure health literacy within the healthcare setting to determine the most
effective approach to target patients. The measurement of asthma judgment
skills contribute to a deeper understanding of patients’ asthma self-management
in crucial topics for asthma control, and have the advantage of assessing
the specific abilities needed for this particular condition, which in turn
benefits the translation of the findings from the use of this tool into strategies
that directly tackle the needs of asthma patients.
Original Article
Non commercial use only
op content-specific tools as the knowledge and skills required vary.
The purpose of the present work is to continue the evaluation of this
newly developed tool and find out whether patients with higher judgment
skills perform better than patients with low judgment skills in different
asthma self-management practices such as medicine usage,
trigger control, symptoms recognition, information seeking, doctorpatient
communication, and exercise. Furthermore, this study aimed to
investigate the associations between patients’ past self-management
experiences and their impact on responding to similar situations.