We recently completed a study, similar to that by Bhandari, 1 exploring the readability of assessment letters being produced by an adult community mental health team (CMHT) in south-west England. We looked at all new assessment letters produced over a 3-month period. As the CMHT assessment is usually the first point of contact with services, we felt that the readability of assessment letters was particularly important with regard to engagement and promoting a shared understanding of a person's

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... ifficulties. We used readability software available as a standard with Microsoft Word 2007 to establish the Flesch Reading Ease. 2