The Online Community’s Literacy About Patient Rights in Hospital (A Case Study of WhatsApp Group Online Community)

Abstract

Health literacy is one’s ability to seek, access, assess
and make decisions related to health problems they face.
Patient rights in the hospital are some of the basic health
issues which needs to be understood before accessing
health services.The patient rights in hospital are regulated
in Law No. 44 of 2009 on Hospital. Therefore, people need
to have literacy about the patient rights when accessing
health care facilities so that they can get maximum
services and improve their health status. This study aims
to find out the level of online community’s literacy about
patients’ rights in hospital. Descriptive quantitative
method was employed in this study, assessing the level
of online community’s literacy about the patients right
in hospital. The respondent of this study was an online
community, consisting 200 members of a WhatsApp
group which the researcher has been part of. The results
showed that the levels of online community’s literacy
about patient rights were excellent (80.4%), sufficient
(15.1%), problematic (1.5%) and Inadequate (3.0%).
However, there is one question item in the questionnaire
that showed that 36.7% of the community members were
in inadequate and problematic levels on their ability to
search, find and choose information they needed in the
hospital environment. In conclusion, the excellent level
of health literacy about the patient rights impacted one’s
ability to determine and obtain maximum quality of health
care. In addition, the use of social media as the source
of information had positive impact on health information
especially about the patient rights in health care services.
Thus, the government needs to use social media as a mean
of delivering information in the health care sector.