Background Health systems promote patient involvement in healthcare decisions. In order to achieve this, patients need information and often this is supplied as written material so that the readability of the text becomes a quality indicator.

Purpose To analyse the readability of patient information regarding hospital treatment provided by the pharmacy department, and to ensure that information is suitable for patients, regardless of their sociocultural level.

Material and methods All patient information sheets designed by the pharmacy service in 2015 to onco-haematological treatments (oral) were analysed and compared against the same number of oncological information sheets designed by the oncological group of the Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacy (GEDEFO). Regarding analysis of readability, two ‘readability indexes’ validated for the Spanish language were used. The first one was the Fernández-Huerta index, with the formula: 206.84 – [(60 x (syllables/words)) + (1.02 x (words/phrases))]. The second index was the Flesch-Szigriszt, with the formula: 206.835 – [(62.3 x (syllables/words)) + (words/phrases)]. Regarding interpretation of the results, values below 60 were considered as unfit for sanitary material in the Fernández-Huerta index compared with values below 55 for the Flesch-Szigriszt index.

Results A total of 11 onco-haematological treatment information sheets were included and compared with 11 sheets of GEDEFO.

For the pharmacy service, 6 of the 11 drug information sheets (55%) did not provide adequate information for patients, while for GEDEFO all of them provided adequate information.

Conclusion More than half of the information sheets did not have an adequate readability index. This will lead to a process of improvement in the performance of patient information sheets, to achieve adequate readability for patient focused medical supplies.

No conflict of interest