In the absence of a medical professional, patient information leaflets (PILs) serve as consumers’ source of legitimate information about what a medical drug contains, what risks are involved in taking it, and how it should be safely administered and handled. More than just being a reference material, PILs guide consumers to make informed healthcare decisions for themselves. Hence, PILs become problematic when they defeat their purpose of delivering comprehensive information and become a source of confusion to consumers. Guided by the user-based tripartite model of communicative effectiveness (Garner et al., 2012), this paper evaluated the readability and comprehensibility of existing PILs culled from three common nonprescription medications in Philippine households – fever reducers, cough and subjected to a readability test using the measures of text readability and easability medication category – to undergo user-testing via cloze procedure taken by 41 adult participants. Results revealed that based on the readability test, the existing PILs were found to be more academic-oriented rather than spoken-like, thus requiring that half of the participants demonstrated an independent level of understanding of nonspecialist readers.
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