Evaluating an Intervention to Lower Health Literacy Demand of Graduate Student Clinician Summary Cover Letters to Patients

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association encourages university programs to cultivate skills related to client health literacy among students. One means of doing so is to train students to write in a way that places lower health literacy demands on clients and their families. This study tested the effectiveness of a health literacy module for improving students’ skills in writing client letters to accompany diagnostic reports. Students in two sections of an advanced graduate seminar in Speech Pathology course were assigned to write cover letters to be sent to a hypothetical client at the UCF Communication Disorders Clinic. Reading grade level calculators of the pretest indicated students wrote at a college level, and the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT) revealed that students performed worst on literacy elements which are not regularly associated with letter writing, but which can dramatically assist with readability and comprehension: breaking information into chunks, using informative headers, and using visual cues like bullet points, bolding, and font size. Fewer than half of students regularly used plain language and active voice. After completing the module, grade level of student writing had lowered to high school, but no statistically significant differences were found in use of specific literacy elements.