An Exploration of Digital Health Literacy in Malaysia

Introduction

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, access to timely and accurate information during any infectious disease outbreak becomes ever more essential as part of the strategy to curb the spread of the diseases among the population. According to Marzoet al. (2022), quality and up-to-date information from the digital platforms about the source of the pandemic, specific health threats, dissemination, mortality, can minimize the risk of infection and public anxiety. Although health information can easily be obtained and spread through various social media platforms available such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc., there are challenges of false information being shared which could escalate into social anxiety. Similarly, Kyaw et al. (2022) agreed that the availability of digital technologies such as the internet and social media platforms has led to a widespread COVID-19 infodemic which interferes with national public health containment strategies and public health communication. Meanwhile, Dadaczynski et al. (2021) reported a low level of health literacy was found from the population with many reported facing the difficulty to deal with reliable health-related information.

In order to curb the spread of false information shared and to allow the public to access accurate information on the COVID-19 situation, the Malaysian Ministry of Health has responded by disseminating information on the COVID-19 statistics through its official websites. Other communication strategies adopted included the development of public broadcasting organizations with web-based media campaigns, such as daily nationwide podcasts. This was to ensure that the public has access to the pertinent information about COVID-19 and an understanding of how it could affect health. On 20 April 2020, a health application known as MySejahtera was launched to curb COVID-19 infections. MySejahtera allows the members of the public to monitor their health status and enables the Ministry of Health (MOH) to keep track of the people’s health status information for efficient and effective action (MCMC, 2020). The MySejahtera application was further improved to be a public health platform with a new feature as a healthrecord application allowing the storage of health and immunization records.Recently, MySejahterahas been expanded to ease appointments at government health facilities (Hilmy, 2022).

According to Azlan et al. (2021), health literacy is progressively recognized as an indicator to describe a nation’s health status. Health literacy has advantages that go beyond individual health care, such as effective illness prevention and improving health promotion in general. The concept of health literacy goes beyond health education as it tackles social and environmental determinants that could affect an individual’s capability in engaging with health information, with the ability to reach well-informed decisions for their health benefit and others. Studies in the past haveattributed low health literacy to poor health conditions (Jandorf et al., 2019; Anwar et al., 2020). Meanwhile, another study by Haun et al. (2015) has associated low health literacy with higher healthcare utilization and costs. Santos et al. (2017) inferred that higher levels of health literacy will allow better health decisions. Evidence from a much recent study by McCaffery et al. (2020) pointed out that people with inadequate health literacy tend to have a poorer understanding of the COVID-19 symptoms, having difficulty to identify behaviors to prevent infection and experienced challenges to obtain accurate information related to COVID-19.