The average adult in Ireland and some other industrialised countries cannot interpret written instructions with accuracy and consistency, a literacy conference was told yesterday.
The average adult also has some difficulty finding one or two pieces of information in a sports article with accuracy and consistency, Dr Rima Rudd, director of education programmes at the Department of Health and Social Behaviour in Harvard University, told the conference.
The conference on health and literacy, organised by the National Adult Literacy Agency, was held in the Mater Hospital, Dublin.
It was vital that the reading abilities of adults be taken into account when designing health literature, Dr Rudd said. Health-related literature prepared for the public consistently demanded a level of reading ability above that of the average adult, she added.
One of the difficulties encountered by people with low literacy skills in medical settings is that "the language in use is not English", she said. If the hospital clinic dealing with kidney conditions was identified in signs as Nephrology, "the nephrologist knows where he's going, but it's no help to the patient looking for the part of the hospital dealing with kidney complaints".
There was a case for teaching student doctors how to communicate in plain English as well as teaching them medical terminology, Dr Rudd said.
Dr Michael Cowan, director of the Community Literacy Centre at Loyola University, New Orleans, questioned whether people can be said to give informed consent to medical procedures which they have not been enabled to understand. Silence should not be taken as consent, he said.
A report based on surveys by researcher Ms Anne McCarthy, and presented at the conference, says that "where a patient is showing signs of resistance when requested to sign a document, it may be an indication that this person has literacy difficulties".
One woman she spoke to for the survey "still had no knowledge of what the surgeon had removed from her, as she had not understood the information given to her". This had implications for the giving of informed consent.
The report, Health Literacy, was launched by the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Mr Brian Lenihan, who said that while he was impressed by the adult education work he had seen, he was concerned at the low participation by men.