In the United States, more than 90 million people have significant difficulty both in reading and comprehending written patient information given to them in the form of self-directed patient instructions. Health literacy according to Healthy People 2010 is "the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions;" thus health literacy has been described as "the means by which holders of knowledge can make that knowledge understandable and usable for the receiver". The American Medical Association published a report encouraging more research on health literacy. The Joint Commission and Healthy People 2010 are concerned with the importance of addressing this issue, and has put forth benchmarks on health literacy for hospitals to attain. Readability of a document is influenced by the words, content, print size, page layout, column width and legibility, print color, grammar, the number of syllables, etc. An essential tool to assess the reading level of written materials, th Readability Calculation Software, will be presented.

Section Description

We are pleased to present the abstracts from sgna's 36th annual course, SGNA: your gateway to opportunity. The diversity of these topics certainly reflects the richness and breadth of our specialty. in keeping with the tradition of the annual course, we hope the following abstracts will encourage discussions for improving nursing practice and patient care outcomes.