Suggestions for writing patient information leaflets

If patients cannot read or understand the patient information leaflets provided to them, the problem often lies in the sender, who provides the information in unreadable language. Therefore, their usefulness will be limited or nonexistent, undermining the purpose of communication-to inform truthfully so that the patient may play an active part in decisionmaking. Drawing on a corpus of 85 patient information leaflets, this article provides a set of suggestions to follow in order to write readable patient information leaflets in Spanish. It is structured in four areas: design, content, linguistic aspects, and nonverbal elements. Each one of them also summarizes the most frequent errors in patient information leaflets.