Assessment of Canadian patient education material for oncology pharmaceutics

Abstract

Introduction Health literacy is an individual’s ability to access, understand, and utilize information in order to create an informed decision regarding their health. Readability plays an integral role in health literacy as complex health information may be inaccessible to those with low health literacy. The aim of this study is to determine the readability of Canadian patient education material (PEM) for oncology related pharmaceutics. Methods Eighty PEMs from Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) and BC Cancer (BCC) were evaluated for their reading level using a Ford, Caylor, Sticht (FORCAST) analysis. Twenty therapies were then randomly selected and converted to plain text to be analyzed further using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) Index, the Coleman-Liau Index (CLI), and the Gunning Fog Index (GFI). Results Both PEMs from CCO and BCC were above the recommended reading level with PEMs from CCO, on average, requiring a higher reading level. Within the text, the section which describes side effects was found to be the most complex section of the representative PEMs from BCC. PEMs from BCC which described antibody-based therapies were, on average, more difficult to read than small molecule-based therapies regardless from which section the PEM was being analyzed. These observations were not seen in CCO PEMs. Conclusions Overall, online PEMs from major Canadian cancers associations were written above the recommended reading level. Consideration should be given to revision of these materials, with emphasis on the therapies’ side effects, to allow for greater comprehension amongst a wider target audience.

Health Services: A Mixed Methods Assessment of Canadian Cancer Patient Education Materials Related to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus

“…On the other hand, medical jargon which contains few letters and syllables, such as renal, may evade detection on readability tests that rely only on the number of letters and syllables. 37 The difficulty word analysis also identified words as complex based on their syllabic count, many of which included medical jargon. However, in the absence of direct patient interviews, it is difficult to draw conclusions on which terms patients may or may not understand in the context of these PEMs.…”

Assessment of the Readability and Quality of Online Patient Education Material for Chronic Medical Conditions

“…Grouped by disease cluster, the medical conditions that had the lowest readability average were kidney disease, cancer, and urinary incontinence. Certain associations have begun to use readability indices in the development of their PEMs; for example, the National Cancer Institute uses the SMOG readability test as its gold standard [ 36 ]. In addition, certain disease clusters only had a small number of associations creating PEMs, which may confound readability either positively or negatively depending on whether readability was factored in during their authorship.…”

“…Several other studies have examined PEM readability across many surgical and medical specialties outside of geriatrics [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 36 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ]. In addition, we have previously assessed PEMs from geriatric-specific associations.…”

Assessment of the Readability of Web-Based Patient Education Material From Major Canadian Pediatric Associations: Cross-sectional Study

“…If the data were not normally distributed, then a nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis test was employed. Multiple comparisons tests, such as Tukey tests, were used to identify differences between sample means in the ANOVA analysis [ 36 ]. The data were analyzed using Graph Pad Prism (version 9; GraphPad Software Inc).…”