[Developing patient information sheets in general practice. Proposal for a methodology].

Background: Health information is patients' wish and right. For general practitioners, it is a duty, a legal obligation and a pre-requisite in any preventive approach. Written information must complete oral information since it improves health care quality. However, in general practice, there are no patient documents which are scientifically valid, understandable and efficient in terms of communication.

Objective: To develop a method for creating patient information sheets and to experiment its feasibility through the development of 125 sheets focused on the most common clinical conditions in general practice.

Method: Research and literature review pour the development of specifications, and creation of 125 sheets following these specifications.

Results: The specifications developed consist of the 10 following steps: selection of the topic and the objectives, literature review, selection of the sections, drafting, validation of the scientific contents, assessment among patients, validation of the layout, selection of the media, delivery to patients and update. Following these specifications, we developed 125 information sheets. Each of these was reviewed by several physicians and assessed with R. Flesh readability test (the established acceptable threshold value was 40). The 30 sheets associated with the lowest scores were selected and reviewed to improve their overall readability.

Conclusion: Even though some difficulties cannot be avoided when developing patient information sheets, each physician or physician association can create its own documents following the proposed specifications and thus deliver a customized message.