Objective  To construct the evaluation indexes for adolescent medical literacy based on the core literacy framework, thus providing a scientific basis for education and health departments to formulate and implement effective health education interventions and the research on adolescent medical literacy.

Methods From November 2024 to October 2025, through literature review, semi-structured interviews, and group discussions, the item pool of indexes was constructed. Delphi method was employed to conduct two rounds of consultation with 18 experts to determine the evaluation indexes, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was adopted to calculate the weight of each index.

Results The questionnaire recovery rates in the two rounds of expert consultation were both 100%, and the expert authority coefficients were both 0.93, indicating a high degree of expert authority. The two rounds of expert consultation showed the Kendall′s coefficients of concordance of expert opinions being 0.316 and 0.276 and the intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) being 0.935 and 0.961, respectively, which indicated that the expert opinions were consistent. The evaluation index system of medical literacy for adolescents was composed of 56 items in 11 second-level indexes from 3 dimensions of basic medical knowledge, medical rescue skills, and medical cognitive attitude. The first-level indexes with weights from high to low were basic medical knowledge (0.400), medical cognitive attitude (0.400), and medical rescue skills (0.200). Among the second-level indexes, cognition (0.500), disease prevention and treatment knowledge (0.391), common emergency treatment (0.351), and basic life knowledge (0.351) ranked the top four. The consistency ratios of the first-level indexes, the second-level indexes, and the third-level indexes were all less than 0.1, which met the standard requirements of consistency test, and the weight distribution of indexes was reasonable.

Conclusions The evaluation indexes of adolescent medical literacy are scientific and reliable, which can provide reference for education departments and schools to formulate the curriculum contents of adolescent health education.