• Pain Med · Oct 2017

    Availability and Readability of Online Patient Education Materials Regarding Regional Anesthesia Techniques for Perioperative Pain Management.

    • Gunjan Kumar, Steven K Howard, Alex Kou, T Edward Kim, Alexander J Butwick, and Edward R Mariano.
    • VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Stanford University School of Medicine, Anesthesiology and Perioperative Care Service, Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford, California.
    • Pain Med. 2017 Oct 1; 18 (10): 2027-2032.

    ObjectivePatient education materials (PEM) should be written at a sixth-grade reading level or lower. We evaluated the availability and readability of online PEM related to regional anesthesia and compared the readability and content of online PEM produced by fellowship and nonfellowship institutions.MethodsWith IRB exemption, we constructed a cohort of online regional anesthesia PEM by searching Websites from North American academic medical centers supporting a regional anesthesiology and acute pain medicine fellowships and used a standardized Internet search engine protocol to identify additional nonfellowship Websites with regional anesthesia PEM based on relevant keywords. Readability metrics were calculated from PEM using the TextStat 0.1.4 textual analysis package for Python 2.7 and compared between institutions with and without a fellowship program. The presence of specific descriptive PEM elements related to regional anesthesia was also compared between groups.ResultsPEM from 17 fellowship and 15 nonfellowship institutions were included in analyses. The mean (SD) Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level for PEM from the fellowship group was 13.8 (2.9) vs 10.8 (2.0) for the nonfellowship group (p = 0.002). We observed no other differences in readability metrics between fellowship and nonfellowship institutions. Fellowship-based PEM less commonly included descriptions of the following risks: local anesthetic systemic toxicity (p = 0.033) and injury due to an insensate extremity (p = 0.003).ConclusionsAvailable online PEM related to regional anesthesia are well above the recommended reading level. Further, fellowship-based PEM posted are at a higher reading level than PEM posted by nonfellowship institutions and are more likely to omit certain risk descriptions.2016 American Academy of Pain Medicine. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.

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