Quality of websites with patient information about spinal cord injury in Spanish

Study Design: Descriptive, cross-sectional analysis of websites with information on spinal cord injury (SCI) in Spanish. Objective: To assess the quality, readability and presence of quality labels on web pages with information about SCI in Spanish. Setting: The Internet. Methods: An Internet search was conducted on Google with the keywords ‘lesión medular’ (spinal cord injury), ‘paraplejia’ (paraplegia) and ‘tetraplejia’ (tetraplegia). The first 50 results of each search were included. The quality of websites was assessed with the LIDA tool while the readability was assessed with the Flesch-Szigriszt index and the INFLESZ scale. We also checked the presence of any quality label. Results: After excluding duplicated and irrelevant results, 33 websites were analysed. Only four of them had a quality label. The mean score of the LIDA tool was 61.12% (medium quality), and the worst results were those referring to the reliability of the information. The readability of the web pages was somewhat difficult, with a mean of 48.22 in the Flesch-Szigriszt index. Only eight of the websites showed normal readability. We observed no differences in either the quality or the readability of the websites according to their origin or the presence of quality labels. Conclusions: The websites analysed present a medium quality. Mainly, they should improve the reliability of their contents and their readability, including more quality labels. For SCI information in Spanish to be understandable and to provide valuable content, websites analysed in our study need to improve the quality parameters.