Assessment of online patient education material for eye cancers: A cross-sectional study

Courtney van Ballegooie; Jasmine Wen

doi:10.1371/journal.pgph.0001967

Assessment of online patient education material for eye cancers: A cross-sectional study

PLOS Glob Public Health. 2023 Oct 16;3(10):e0001967. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0001967. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Courtney van Ballegooie^{1

2

3}, Jasmine Wen⁴

Affiliations

¹ Experimental Therapeutics, BC Cancer, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
² Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
³ Department of Chemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
⁴ Department of Science, University of Western Ontario, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.

Abstract

The objective of this study was to assess online American patient education material (PEM) related to eye cancers in order to determine the quality of the content and appropriateness of the contents' reading level as it relates to the American population. PEMs were extracted from fifteen American cancer and ophthalmology associations and evaluated for their reading level using ten validated readability scales. PEMs then had all words extracted and evaluated for their difficulty and familiarity. The quality of the PEMS were assessed according to DISCERN, Heath On the Net Foundation Code of Conduct (HONCode), and JAMA benchmarks. Overall, online PEMs from the associations were written at a 11th grade reading level, which is above the recommended 6th grade reading level. The difficult word analysis identified that 26% of words were unfamiliar. Only one of the fifteen association held a HONCode certification while no organization met the standards of all four JAMA benchmarks. The average score for DISCERN was 2.4 out of a total of 5 for the fifteen questions related to treatment option information quality. Consideration should be made to create PEMs at an appropriate grade reading level to encourage health literacy and ultimately promote health outcomes. Associations should also focus on incorporating easily identifiable quality indicators to allow patients to better identify reputable resources.

Copyright: © 2023 van Ballegooie, Wen. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the University of British Columbia (6569 to CvB), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (21R04868 to CvB), and the Nanomedicines Innovation Network (10901 to CvB). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.