Background. The British Association of Dermatologists (BAD) develops and produces patient information leaflets (PILs) for British clinicians and the general public, and its website provides access to all the PILs. Health literacy across the UK remains variable. Readability instruments assess the comprehensibility of text, predominately using a composite of sentence length and/or word-syllable number. Instruments usually report text readability categorized by United States (US) grades; ideally, health literature should be rated at US grade ≤ 6 (UK Year 7; age 11-12 years). Methods. In collaboration with the BAD, PILs on the BAD website (n = 203) were downloaded for readability assessment. PILs were processed prior to analysis using Readability Studio software (Oleander Software, Vandalia, OH, USA). Established readability metrics were used: Flesch-Kincaid (FK), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), Gunning fog index (GFI), Fry, FORCAST and Flesch Reading Ease (FRE). Results. The mean (95% CI) US grade levels for all BAD PILs were
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.