This is a good idea. Patients can take the same material home as a reminder and to share with caregivers. We wondered if The Patient Page would be a good resource for prenatal care providers, so we decided to evaluate the materials. We chose alcohol as a test topic because it comes up first on the public online menu and it addresses a key message in prenatal education. We started the review by checking the readability level of the text.
Readability is only one of many factors known to affect comprehension, but it is a deal breaker.
If the materials exceed the literacy skills of intended readers, handing it out becomes an expensive gesture. Table 1 summarizes the readability scores. The Flesch formula may be most appropriate to this case since it is designed to evaluate adult materials and takes into account the fact that conversational writing is easier to read. The mean Flesch score for the three sections of the Patient Page is 12.47. This score shows that the information is readable by those with the reading skills of a college freshman.