Final report of the I-CMI Linguistic Research Component to the I-CMI Project

Aims & focus of the linguistic component of the I-CMI project. This document reports on part of Step 2 of the I-CMI Project, which set out to collate and evaluate existing written consumer medicine information (CMI). For Step 2 the overall Research Objectives were: -to identify the different forms of medicine information (written and electronically generated) available for prescription and pharmacist-only medicines used in community pharmacy practice nationally and in English-speaking countries internationally -to collate, analyse and evaluate the different forms of written medicine information identified. The document also reports on how this information was used to make recommendations for adjusting the expression and organisation of information in the CMIs as part of further phases of the overall I-CMI project. While other project contributors were using existing published evaluation criteria from pharmacy research to evaluate the CMIs collected (see Raynor et al 2007a, 2007b), we were invited to take a look at the same CMIs from a different perspective – the perspective of linguistic text analysis. Broadly, the aim of our component was to map out how differences in text features are likely to affect the professional-consumer interactions in which they are delivered. In particular we considered: •how the roles and responsibilities of professionals (such as pharmacists, prescribers) and consumers and carers are construed in the CMI texts •textual cohesion of different CMIs – or the degree to which and the manner in which CMIs as texts ‘hang together’ •audience design: in particular, how the text itself presents some information as ‘given information’, and constructs other issues as ‘new information’ •the construction of ‘take home’ messages about risk •what the design of CMIs inscribes about their purpose and their role in managing healthcare.