Researchers writing in the American Journal of Surgery say that far too many patients leaving the hospital don’t understand follow-up plans for care at home because the plans are written for people with higher reading levels in mind.
A study of discharge instructions given to about 500 trauma patients found that only one fourth had the needed reading skills to adequately understand their instructions!
The study’s senior author, Martin Zielinski, M.D., a trauma surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, laid some of the problem to the fact that dismissal documents are written for two different groups – patients and families and their physicians, who are accustomed to medical jargon.