ETHIC – Evaluation Tool of Health Information for Consumers.Development, features and validation [fulltext].

Good information is a fundamental component of the therapeutic process and Health Information issues are of strategic importance, mostly in social and cultural contexts characterized by low literacy levels, as the Italian one. ETHIC (Evaluation Tool of Health Information for Consumers) is an instrument developed for the quality assessment of health information materials from a linguistic, textual and documentary point of view. Our aim is to provide bio-medical librarians and health information professionals with a tool that could be helpful in directing consumers toward the best information available and in supporting healthcare professionals in the development of health information materials. ETHIC allows to assess printed health information resources (booklets, depliants etc.) and consists of a checklist and an instruction manual. ETHIC has been drawn up according to the present literature and it’s inspired to presently available tools and to publications and guidelines on plain language writing. Furthermore, ETHIC embeds instruments for the evaluation of text readability, lexical understandability and for the assessment of non-textual elements such as tables. The checklist consists of 24 items and the scoring system allows to compare each other different information materials. The instruction manual shows how to perform the evaluation, explains how to assign the correct score to each single item and contains practical examples which can guide through the evaluation process. ETHIC will undergo to a validation procedure to prove its efficacy and effectiveness. ETHIC could represent an effective tool for bio-medical librarians and health information professionals to assess the quality of health information materials for consumers, to support healthcare professionals in drawing up good quality health information materials, to contribute in facilitating knowledge creation and also to enhance their professionals skills. The validation procedure will have to confirm the accuracy of development process and tool itself.