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Health Education Research Advance Access originally published online on September 22, 2007
Health Education Research 2008 23(4):603-611; doi:10.1093/her/cym051
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Will patients agree to have their literacy skills assessed in clinical practice?

John G. Ryan1, Fermin Leguen2, Barry D. Weiss3,*, Sonya Albury4, Terri Jennings5, Fulton Velez1 and Nadia Salibi4

1 Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Miami School of Medicine, Miami, FL 33136, USA
2 Miami-Dade County Health Department, Miami, FL 33126, USA
3 Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, AZ 85724, USA
4 Health Council of South Florida, Miami, FL 33128, USA
5 Social Science and Research Consultants, Davie, FL 33330, USA

* Correspondence to: B. D. Weiss. E-mail: bdweiss{at}u.arizona.edu

If health providers are aware of their patients' literacy skills, they can more appropriately tailor their communication with patients. Few providers, however, assess patient's literacy skills for fear of offending patients, but no research has ever determined if patients object to such assessments. Our objectives were to determine the percentage of patients seen for routine health care that would agree to undergo literacy assessment and if satisfaction of patients differs in practices that perform literacy assessments versus practices that do not. We randomized 20 private and public medical practices to an intervention group that implemented literacy assessments with the Newest Vital Sign and a control group that did not. For intervention practices, we noted the percentage of patients agreeing to undergo the assessment. For both intervention and control practices, we assessed patient satisfaction. Of 289 patients asked to undergo literacy assessment in the intervention practices, 284 (98.3%) agreed to do so, including 125 (46.1%) with low or possibly low literacy skills. There was no difference in satisfaction between the intervention group and the control group. We conclude that patients are willing to undergo literacy assessments during routine office visits and performing such assessments does not decrease patient satisfaction.

Received on July 16, 2006; accepted on June 28, 2007


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