. . . consent forms and other medical forms are typically written at the graduate school level, although the average American adult reads at the eighth-grade level.
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Hi,
A useful health literacy resource is the book “Advancing health literacy: A framework for understanding and action” from Jossey-Bass.
And yet other patients are complaining that they find medical literature intended for a lay-audience ‘condescending’. We never win.
Both you and your patients lose if you use consent forms to obtain consent. If you understand that consent is always obtained in a direct personal and individualized conversation, and that a form is just a testament that the conversation has occured, then the form is kept in its proper place as a minor side-bar to the process and whether it is condescending or a little overcomplex is not really important.
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