Readability Analysis of Central Line Care

Name

Institution

Tutor

Course

Date

Readability Analysis of Central Line Care

Introduction

This is a document provided by the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance on how to care for the central venous catheter. The document is meant for adults as the title suggests (central care line for adults). It, therefore, means that the level of understanding is beyond any 8th grade. This is one mistake that most health centers make when producing the guidelines. They only focus on the grownup person taking care of the patient and forgets that the patients themselves, despite their age, should have a good understanding of whatever is happening to them. This makes the patient to know their roles and to be able to take good care of themselves even in the absence of the caretaker and reduces worries whenever the caretaker has something else to attend to. As such, a readability analysis is performed on this document using the proven formula and corrections are made to give the 8th grade a good understanding of the set guidelines. The information should thus be appropriate to the grade level, literacy level and age.

Readability Analysis of the Original Document

This involves reading through the document and analyzing the words in terms of who can easily understand. The question ‘who is our target reader?’ is normally asked. If we find that it only targets a particular level of understanding and not any other group of persons, then corrective measures are taken using the stated formulae. Some readability analysis tools include the SMOG, Fog, Fry Graph and Flesch-Kincaid scale.

The Smog Readability Test

For this document, I used the SMOG readability test. This involves taking paragraph samples from the document and analyzing them. Since it is a big document, 10 sentences are taken at the beginning, 10 at the middle and 10 at the end. The total of 30 sentences are read and the words with syllables of three and more are counted. The sum of these words from the 30 sentences are compared against the SMOG readability table the give the readability level. The analysis shows that a total of 63 words have three and more syllables and that it can be understood by an 11th grade, as shown in the table below:

Revising the Document

I read through the document, replacing the long syllable words with short syllable equivalent words while keeping the message from the sentences unchanged. I was also able to replace some medical terms with equivalent simple terms. I have also put explanation to some words in bracket. The document format is, however, kept. I then performed the readability analysis and an 8th grade level can now understand because only 14 words from the sampled 30 paragraphs had three and more syllables.

Reference

http://prevention.sph.sc.edu/tools/SMOG.pdf

Fred Hutch- Seattle children’s- UW Medicine (2016), Patient and Family Education (Central

Line Care Adults)