Analysis finds patient letters from eye clinics often too difficult to read
Letters to patients from ophthalmology services—the highest-volume outpatient specialty in U.K. health care—include too much complex language and medical terminology that patients are likely to find hard to understand, according to an analysis of more than 4 million letters from one large hospital trust, published in the open-access journal BMJ Health & Care Informatics.
A recent study analyzing over 4.6 million letters from ophthalmology clinics in the U.K. has found that the majority of the correspondence is written at a college-level reading comprehension, which is far more complex than recommended for patient materials. This difficulty in understanding has been shown to persist despite policy recommendations and efforts to improve readability.
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