Objective To develop a health literacy assessment tool for patients with a permanent stoma. Methods Based on literature review and qualitative interviews, an item pool was developed and two rounds of expert consultation were conducted. Then 220 patients with permanent stoma were investigated to test the reliability and validity. Results The formal scale included 31 items asses-sing 3 domains.The functional domain consisted of 4 factors (acquisition, reading, understanding, and communicating stoma-rela-ted information ability), the knowledge domain included 2 factors (prevention and management of stoma, nursing skills for stoma), and the attitude domain also included 2 factors (perspectives of stoma, and behavior intention). The 8 factors could explain 56.787% of the total variance. The scale-level content validity index was 0.890, the Cronbach′s α coefficient was 0.864, and the split-half reliability coefficient was 0.923. Conclusion The health literacy scale for patients with permanent stoma has good reliability and validity and can be used as an measurement tool.