Patient Education Materials for Age-Related Hearing Loss via Hearing Journal

Patient Education Materials for Age-Related Hearing Loss

Journals lww-Hearing Journal: April 2020 by Ou, Hua PhD; Squires, Erika S.

Patient education materials (PEM) that highlight the risk factors, signs, symptoms, and treatment options for age-related hearing loss (ARHL) are critical given that the number of people with hearing loss is rapidly increasing due to population aging. When designing PEMs, it is important to consider the health literacy skills of the intended audience to ensure that the materials can be read, used, and understood by consumers. Health literacy is defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and under-stand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” If health care providers share educational materials that are not matched to the health literacy skills of their patients, these materials will be ineffective at encouraging individuals to seek hearing health care and will not support the development of self-efficacy and self-management skills. In the United States, the average adult reads at the eight- or ninth-grade level, and only an estimated 12 percent of adults can effectively read and understand health information. Readability and suitability are common measures used to assess the health literacy of written PEMs. Readability is an objective measure of how easy or difficult a text is to read, while suitability measures design appropriateness and evaluates the adequacy of material content and design, cultural and linguistic appropriateness, and ability to motivate individuals to take action.

Previous investigations into the readability and suitability of PEMs on hearing health have revealed that the majority of materials are not written at an appropriate level for the intended audience. These studies have focused on the readability and suitability of PEMs on general hearing health topics; however, the issue of health literacy is particularly relevant to older adults who demonstrate lower levels of health literacy compared with their younger counterparts.

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KEY ISSUES & SOLUTIONS

Our study revealed that 66.7 percent of PEMs were written above target readability (i.e., above eighth-grade level), which was based on the average reading level of U.S. adults. The average readability of all PEMs in the study was grade level 9.73, indicating that an individual would need an education level higher than ninth grade to be able to read the material. An analysis of suitability using the SAM revealed that the average PEM was classified as adequate. In total, 85.2 percent (23/27) of PEMs were classified as adequate, and 14.8 percent (4/27) were classified as not suitable. No PEMs were identified as having superior suitability.  READ MORE ➤➤

Automatic Readability Checker

Based on (7) readability formulas:

Grade Level: 13

Reading Level: difficult to read.

Reader's Age: 18-19 yrs. Old

(college level entry)