Texts of Clinical Recommendations in the Aspect of the Category of Informativeness

The article examines texts of clinical recommendations (clinical practice guidelines) in the aspect of the category of informativeness. The purpose of this article is to study the category of informativeness in relation to target groups of clinical recommendations: doctors; paramedics, doctors and paramedics of disaster medicine; nurses; patients and caregivers. The objectives of the study were as follows: to determine information components (cognitive, modal, and textual), types of information (in accordance with I. R. Galperin’s concept); to identify information properties, techniques for creating ‘dense’ and ‘non-dense’ text as well as linguistic means of representing informativeness; to differentiate ‘documentary’ and ‘linguistic’ informativeness in the texts of the guidelines. The category of informativeness, being the key one for this kind of texts, interacts with other textual categories: within the framework of interdiscourse interaction (the amount of information increases due to the inclusion of intertextual links – a connection with the category of intertextuality), within the juxtapositions of specialists and non-specialists, scientific and commonplace ideas about the object of speech (connection with the category of addressing). Individualized and harmonized guidelines are characterized by expanded information; clinical manuals for patients, operational versions of manuals, abridged versions of guidelines – by compressed presentation of information; patient-oriented and distributed computer-interpreted manuals, narrative manuals, ‘live’ manuals, due to functional changes, – by the complication of the information component. The properties of reliability, completeness, and objectivity are ensured through the use of approaches to assessing reliability of evidence; clarity and accessibility of information are facilitated by denotational explication, amplification, and inclusion of illustrative material; the density and ergonomics of recommendations are associated with the inclusion of non-verbal components (tables, diagrams, etc.); the relevance of information in the texts is ensured by their regular revision in accordance with the current legislation of a particular country, local regulations.