Revealing the hidden characteristics of patient information for radiography with a lexical bundles analysis.

Despite the importance and the ubiquity of medical patient information in many healthcare systems in the world, existing approaches to its production do not seem to result in an effective product as readability measures continually judge most materials too difficult for patients to comprehend. Radiography is one medical setting where understanding patient information materials is particularly important in view of the rising numbers of examinations being performed and the potential risks involved from radiation, though studies consistently show that patients lack basic knowledge regarding the common radiographic exams. The gap in the literature and the concerns relating to patient understanding of radiation risk means there is a pressing need to investigate the linguistic characteristics and the language demands of radiography patient information, though to date very few studies have been carried out of the register and none that use a lexical bundles analysis. This study describes an analysis of 4-word lexical bundles in a corpus of 221 patient information leaflets for radiography which revealed a predominance of bundles more common to dense informational text and classroom instruction than the conversational, everyday language that healthcare writers are encouraged to use. A high frequency of passive structures - usually considered too complex for patients to process and flagged up by readability measures – was also found. An investigation of the discourse functions of the bundles reveals that the underlying purpose of radiography patient information is to instruct, suggesting that a conflict may exist between this and the concepts of patient-centred healthcare.