Abstract
Purpose :
The American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health recommend that health materials should not exceed the 6th grade reading level. However, a general review of patient educational material (PEM) in ophthalmology has found that PEM is consistently written at a level that exceeds this recommendation. Our goal was to evaluate the readability of patient educational brochures from the American Society of Ophthalmic Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery (ASOPRS).
Methods :
Patient educational brochures from the ASOPRS website were transcribed onto a Microsoft Word document. During the reformatting process, all titles, figures, disclaimers, acknowledgments, citations, references, and hyperlinks were removed. The reformatted patient education resources were then analyzed for readability with Readability Studio Professional Edition 2019.3 (Oleander Software Ltd). The body of text from all 18 ASOPRS patient brochures were analyzed by ten validated tests for readability assessment: Flesch Reading Ease Test (FRE), Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), Coleman-Liau Index (CLI), Gunning Fog Index (GFI), New Dale-Chall Readability (NDC), FORCAST, Fry Graph Readability (FG), Raygor Readability Estimate (RRE), and New Fog Count (NFC).
Results :
The mean (± SD) readability scores from the 18 ASOPRS patient brochures were 48 (4.3), 11.2 (0.8), 13 (0.7), 11.7 (0.8), 13.6 (0.9), 11.6 (1.3), 11.1 (0.5), 12 (1.4), 12 (1.0), and 10.6 (1.3) for FRE, FKGL, SMOG, CLI, GFI, NDC, FORCAST, FG, RRE, and NFC, respectively. All ten of the mean readability scores were well above the sixth-grade reading level as recommended by the National Institute of Health and the American Medical Association for patient educational materials (Figure 1).
Conclusions :
These findings show that the average patient would have difficulty understanding the medical information provided by ASOPRS patient brochures, thereby hindering their ability to make informed decisions on their healthcare. More attention is needed in creating patient educational brochures that is more comprehendible by the general public.
This is a 2021 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.