Disaster Health Literacy of Middle-aged Women

ABSTRACT

As disasters have been increasing in recent years, disaster health literacy is gaining more important for a population such as middle-age women. This is because they face developmental crises (menopause) and situational crisis (disaster). Due to the growing elderly population, it is imperative to seriously consider the issue of aging women's healthcare, and their educational needs relative to emergencies and disasters. The purpose of study was to clarify the importance of disaster health literacy for middle-age women. This study is a review of the literature using PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, Google Scholar, SCOPUS, OVID, ProQuest, Springer, and Wiley. Data was collected with keywords related to the research topic (“Women's health” OR “Geriatric health”) AND (“Health literacy” OR “Disaster health literacy” OR “Disaster prevention literacy” OR “Risk knowledge” OR “Knowledge management”) AND (“Disasters” OR “Risk” OR “Crises”) in combination with the Boolean-operators OR and AND. We reviewed full text English-language articles published November 2011 November 2017. Additional references were identified from reference lists in targeted publications, review articles and books. This review demonstrated that disaster health literacy is critical for elderly women, because they may suffer from physical and psychological problems triggered by developmental crises such as menopause and situational crises such as disasters. Disaster literacy could enable them to improve resiliency and reduce disaster risk. Education has vital role in health promotion of middle-age women. Policymakers and health managers should be aware of the challenges of elderly women as a vulnerable group in disasters and develop plans to incorporate disaster health literacy for preparedness and prevention in educating this group.