Patients Don't Understand Their Post-Hospital Care Plans: Study

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Most individuals visit hospitals for check-ups and, in most cases, for treatment with their current condition. Unfortunately, many of them leave the hospital without any idea of the follow-up care plans. A new study suggested that the instructions for post-hospital care plans are tailored to people with higher reading levels and more education.

According to Fox News, the American Medical Association has already requested to update the instruction and be targeted to a sixth grade audience. The petition was raised because almost half of the U.S. population is marginally or functionally literate, with an elementary or middle-school reading level.

The researchers found out that after giving a discharge instruction to about 500 trauma patients leaving the hospital, only one fourth of them had the reading skills that adequately understand their dismissal notes.

Per the report, the notes are written for two very different audiences. This includes the patients and families who need simple instructions and the medical practitioners who are accustomed to medical jargon, said senior study author Dr. Martin Zielinski, a trauma surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

"Even if patients believe they understand what occurred during their hospitalization and the instructions they are to follow upon dismissal, they can become confused after they leave the hospital environment," Zielinski wrote in an email. He explained that patients get into this situation because "their memory can be clouded by medications they were administered."

Zielinski and his team used two standard formulas to assess how the trauma patients decipher their discharge notes based on the total words, syllables and sentences in the text. Most of the 314 patients in the study had a high school degree while 22 percent has, at least, some college education.

Four percent of the patients were functionally illiterate, with reading levels at a fifth grade or below. The other 40 percent were marginally literate with a sixth to eight grade reading level. On average, it required, at least, a high school education to understand the discharge note.

One should note that the instructions were written at about a 10th grading reading level while other assessments found 13 to 15 year old students might easily understand the notes. The patients' ability to understand the notes is not influenced by their length of stay in the hospital or whether they had surgery.

According to Forbes, both the states and the federal government are already doing something to resolve this. The report stressed that the government is now requiring hospitals to improve their discharge plans and make it more comprehensible to their patients and families.

Dr. Kevin O'Leary, a researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who is not involved in the study is encouraging patients to provide feedbacks to their doctors, so they can revise the wording to improve readability.