Consumer Health Materials for Public Libraries

 Young Adult Book Discussion  Group

Review #2

Baker, Lynda M. and Freta L. Wilson. "Consumer Health Materials Recommended for the Public Library." Public Libraries 35.2 (1996): 124-130

A 1993 U.S. Department of Education report states that at least 90 million adults in the U.S. have difficulty reading. This fact has a significant impact on people’s ability to understand public health information. Much public health information is written on an 8^th grade reading level. However, a significant proportion of the population is unable to read them. As a result, people are unable to effectively use the public health system. This includes the inability to read prescription information or follow doctors’ recommendations.

To complicate matters, bookstores and libraries often shelve professional medical texts and consumer health information together with little or no indication of the intended audience. Many of these materials are also available online. Readers have no guidance regarding how appropriate a particular title is to their information need and reading level.

In response to this situation, librarians are encouraged to determine which materials are appropriate for their collections based on their knowledge of patrons’ needs and preferences. While there are a variety of selection aids, most do not address the issue of readability. Baker and Wilson recommend Dervin’s sense-making model as a means for evaluating medical material for public libraries.

Dervin Suggests that people seek information when they sense a gap between they know and what they don’t know about a specific topic. Dervin emphasizes the Individual and person and his specific information need. The patron needs to be able to make sense of the information as it applies to his individual need. This last point is central. If the reader can not make sense of the material, he may feel that the difference between what he knows and what he doesn’t know is even greater than before he was exposed to the material. Secondly, the inability to understand the information may cause the person to feel more anxious about his medical condition, thereby leaving him less capable of making appropriate decisions. Therefore, librarians must consider readability when selecting health-related materials for the public library.

Baker and Wilson cite previous studies which indicate that consumer health information about asthma, cholesterol and HIV require a minimum of an eighth grade reading level, despite the fact that they were allegedly written for the general reader, who frequently has less than an eighth grade education. In the current article, Baker and Wilson sought to compare the readability between medical information written for doctors with that intended for consumers. Selection criteria for the study included the following:

• Length of the item (Minimum 300-400 words)

• Availability in either a large public library or one of three academic libraries

• Each selection had to contain information about either breast cancer, heart attack or multiple sclerosis

Eight books, articles from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) as well as from the Detroit News were included in the study.

Overall, the materials analyzed were written at a level that required two years of college education. These are materials that were allegedly intended for the general public whose average reading level is grade eight. Granted, we are talking about averages. However, the sources included were written at a reading level appropriate for someone with at least two years post-secondary education. This, despite the fact that, on average, the general public reading level is six years less than that. People without a college education deserve to have readable medical information available to them.