Department of Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.
Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Department of Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.
J Surg Res. 2014 Jul;190(1):144-50. doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2014.03.045. Epub 2014 Mar 22.
The limited functional health literacy of a significant portion of the adult US population negatively affects their access to appropriate online health information about hernia repair surgery. The National Institutes of Health and American Medical Association recommend that patient-directed content should be written at a sixth-grade reading level. This study aims to evaluate readability of the most frequently used Internet resources for patient information about hernia repair relative to average American literacy.
A web search for "hernia repair surgery" was performed, and the top 12 Web sites were identified. Relevant articles (n=102) with patient-directed content immediately available from the main sites were downloaded. The 12 most popular consumer magazines in circulation were also identified, and using the same method, the first 10 articles were downloaded from each magazine's Web site for comparison. Readability was assessed using 10 established analyses. A t-test was used to compare the average grade level of hernia repair and magazine articles for each readability test.
Web-based information about hernia repair had an overall average reading grade level of 13.6. All 102 articles were above the recommended sixth-grade reading level; these were significantly more difficult to read than the comparison group of articles from popular magazines.
Online patient-directed information about hernia repair uniformly exceeds the recommended reading level and may be too difficult to be understood by a large portion of the US population.
相当一部分美国成年人的功能性健康素养有限，这会影响他们获取有关疝修补手术的适当在线健康信息。美国国立卫生研究院和美国医学协会建议，面向患者的内容应编写为六年级阅读水平。本研究旨在评估疝修补最常用的互联网资源的可读性，相对于美国普通读写能力。
对“疝修补手术”进行了网络搜索，确定了前 12 个网站。从主要网站上立即获取面向患者的内容的相关文章（n=102）。还确定了 12 种发行量最大的消费者杂志，并使用相同的方法，从每种杂志的网站上下载了前 10 篇文章进行比较。使用 10 种已建立的分析方法评估可读性。使用 t 检验比较疝修复和杂志文章的每个可读性测试的平均年级水平。
疝修复的基于网络的信息的总体平均阅读水平为 13.6。所有 102 篇文章均高于推荐的六年级阅读水平；这些文章比来自流行杂志的比较组文章更难阅读。
疝修补的在线面向患者的信息普遍超过了推荐的阅读水平，可能对美国大部分人口来说太难理解。
