Introduction:

The Orem’s Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory (SCDNT) states that nurses work with “nursing systems”: Partly compensatory, Wholly compensatory and Supportive-educative. For the latter, printed health instructional resources are important. The efficacy of the programs of the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare (MPH & SW) of Paraguay depends on the readability of those informational aids. However, there are no studies about the readability of these health educational resources in the country.

Objective:

To analyze the readability of printed health educational resources published by the MPH & SW, applying the Gunning Fog Index (GFI).

Methods:

A corpus of 49 health informational resources, published by the MPH & SW between 2003 and 2018, was identified. From these, by random multi-stage sampling, 250 paragraphs were selected. The GFI of each one was calculated. The mean of GFI of these paragraphs was compared with a “gold standard”, designed for the Paraguayan Spanish, based on a sample of opinion articles of national newspapers.

Results:

The mean of GFI calculated was 20.50, which can be read as a “normal” difficulty level on the gold standard scale developed with newspaper opinion articles.

Conclusion:

The paragraphs studied, on average, have comparable readability levels with opinion articles of national newspapers. Since the schooling year average of the country’s population is low (8.4 years), the efficacy of the printed health educational resource for self-care purposes is not guaranteed.

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