Abstract
Printed patient health communication in South Africa is under pressure for various reasons, one being ignorance of the level of health literacy of patients. This pilot study investigated the readability of Sesotho pamphlets given to Sesotho-speaking patients with chronic diseases in the public health sector. Findings obtained through readability tests indicate that the reading level of pamphlets handed to patients is too high, requiring the reader to have had a reading education of approximately nine years or more. This means it is written on a level requiring secondary education, while many people did not complete primary education. The South African context dictates that material should not be written at a level higher than Grade 7 (seven years of schooling), since 21% of the inhabitants of the Free State province has a literacy level (based on years of schooling completed) of Grade 7 or lower.
Highlights
Patients visiting public healthcare services are often handed health information pamphlets to explain or provide more information about a specific health problem
The range of documents collected consisted of all printed Sesotho health pamphlets addressing chronic diseases that were electronically available from the Free State Department of Health Management, as well as hard copies from public health clinics within one of the five districts within the province
This study is the first phase towards the construction of a context-specific health literacy test for Sesotho speakers, in which several informational pamphlets on chronic diseases were subjected to four different readability assessments to give an indication of the level of text difficulty
Summary
Patients visiting public healthcare services are often handed health information pamphlets to explain or provide more information about a specific health problem. Health literacy encompasses the personal characteristics and social resources needed for individuals and communities to access, understand, appraise and use information and services to make decisions about health. From this definition, it is clear to see why readability assessment forms an integral part of the majority of health literacy tests, such as REALM (Arozullah et al 2007), TOFLHA (Parker et al 1995), or Daleen Krige & Marianne Reid. Since a patient must be able to access (mostly through reading) the information contained in health pamphlets, it is important to ascertain whether the readability of these pamphlets is on an accessible level (ideally at a readability level 7 or lower to accommodate possible low schooling levels)
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