The readability of online Canadian radiotherapy patient educational materials

It is not clear if online radiotherapy patient educational materials that are published by the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS) and the various provincial health authorities meet the appropriate readability levels. The aim of this study is to determine the readability of online Canadian radiotherapy patient educational materials.

The publicly available educational materials were acquired from the provincial health authorities' and the CCS's websites. Only English language materials were included. Documents which mainly contained instructions or were part of interactive modules were excluded. The materials were transferred to Microsoft Word documents and labelled by source and category. Editing was then performed and the readability scores were acquired for each document.

A total of 67 documents were included and 4 were excluded. The overall mean Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level from all sources was 7.5 (range, 3.6-13.2; 95% confidence interval [CI] 7.1-7.9), while the overall mean Flesch Reading Ease from all sources was 64.0 (range, 44.2-78.1; 95% confidence interval [CI] 62.0-66.1). The mean Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores from all sources were higher than the grade 6 recommended reading level for patient educational materials. This difference was found to be statistically significant (p ≤ 0.05) for Alberta, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Nova Scotia.

Overall, the readability levels of online Canadian radiotherapy patient educational materials exceed the recommended grade 6 readability for patient educational resources. It is hoped that the findings of this study would inform and guide the future development and distribution of materials that meet the appropriate readability standards.