A SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO PATIENT INFORMATION LEAFLETS (PILs)

Patient empowerment and involvement have become increasingly important within the health sector. There has been a lot of focus on patient information, and a document such as the Patient Information Leaflet (PIL) has been the subject of an ongoing discussion for the last ten years and more. The PIL is considered as a genre with potentially seven moves, and in this study,I have examined a corpus of PILs within a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) framework to evaluate the moves and other features of this genre. The overall aim of this study was to find whether current PILs meet the needs of patients from a linguistic point of view, and to assess their readability. I have examined the leaflets with reference to genre, discourse semantics, and lexico-grammar. The notion of generic structure potential has also been elaborated to identify the generic structure of PILs in this corpus. Furthermore, I have explored the visual features of layout and design, by taking account of the legal requirements and by applying linguistic theories. The findings show that most of the PILs analysed follow the standard text structure and display plain language features in accordance with a user-friendly and patient-centred approach.