Cohort Study Good Practices: Design Guidelines for a Preparatory Stage

• Autor(a) principal: Marques, Daniela Sofia Faria
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.8/8669
• topic: Cohort Study; Guidelines; Good Practices; Capacitation; Service Design; Participatory Design; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Artes

health literacy is recognized as one of the most important predictors of poor health outcomes, with a stronger effect than age, race, income, employment status or education level. In Leiria's county, it is speculated that an appreciable part of the population’s morbidity and poor health habits might be attributable to low health literacy. However, no formal studies were conducted to explore this hypothesis. To address it, institutions in Leiria such as the City Hall, Polytechnic of Leiria and ACES Pinhal Litoral decided to conduct a longitudinal and prospective cohort study, where a sample of the population is followed throughout time to understand if their choices regarding health and lifestyle habits are indeed affected by their health literacy levels. The choice for a cohort study is associated with the ongoing process of "improving literacy", bringing out the interest to know about people’s health literacy currently, and in a future time (10 years). Also, the institutions involved are planning to study, gather more information, and to apply some interventions that aim to improve health literacy, being this type of study the most suitable since it allows them to see if those interventions are having the desired effect (improvement of population’s health literacy). Focused on the preparatory part of this cohort study, this project aims to improve the communication effectiveness between these parts in the county of Leiria, interviewers and population, to avoid common cohort problems, such as: 1) gathering a suitable number of participants that can represent the population; 2) follow-up maintenance of participants; 3) keeping the interviewers and participants engaged with the study, after the first contact. The first step of this project is the development and creation of a distinctive brand, whose identity can be maintained throughout all its communication and dissemination media, so that the population can identify, the cohort study to which it refers and awaken their curiosity to participate.