Kijksluiters: kijken naar gesprekken tussen apotheker en patiënt

Kijksluiters: watching conversations between pharmacists and patients As of 1975, Dutch patients receive a package insert with their medication. Due to extensive national and EU legal regulation efforts, the insert developed into a mandatory genre par excellence. However, its communicative functionality remained doubtful: the patient information leaflet has always been regarded as lengthy, complex and user-unfriendly. Recently, the Dutch Medicine Board has introduced a new, audiovisual medication instruction, the so-called Kijksluiter, that shows a video animation of a conversation about the medicine between a pharmacist and a patient. After a historical introduction, the second section of the paper surveys empirical studies that shed light on the main design parameters of the new genre: spoken instead of written information, animated speakers, dialogue instead of monologue. In the third part, we report on an observation study in which 16 users answer 9 scenario questions using a Kijksluiter video. The results indicate that Kijksluiters are not without user problems. Overall, two-thirds of the answers are more or less correct. Half of the participants first watched the video in its entirety before attending to the questions. The main problem this group encountered is: insufficient recollection of the relevant information. The other half of the participants navigated the Kijksluiter for each question, using the menu offering twelve small chapters. The main problems in this group was not finding the question-relevant chapter; but even after listening to the relevant information, some answers are incorrect. We conclude that, although Kijksluiter does not immediately solve all medication communication problems, its concise audiovisual format broadens the range of media available for medicine users.