A series from the PM Society Patient Engagement Interest Group
If you have been involved with patient engagement or patient communication initiatives, you’ve probably heard phrases such as “we just need to simplify this” or “let’s consider health literacy”. But what does this mean in practice?
Clear language is crucial to support access, remove barriers, and help more people engage with information. However, effective communication depends on more than readability alone. What if we measured quality not by how simple the content is, but by how supported, informed, and able to act people feel after reading it?
The Patient Engagement Interest Group is supporting meaningful engagement
As healthcare moves towards more personalised models, patient engagement has become an increasingly important component of high-quality care. It allows the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare professionals to better understand how someone’s actions and experiences outside of their clinical care can play a vital role in shaping their health outcomes.
As a result, more professionals across medical affairs, marketing, market access, advocacy, and agency teams are contributing to patient-facing content, even if patient communications are not their primary area of expertise.
This article is the first in a series from the PM Society Patient Engagement Interest Group exploring what effective patient communication looks like in practice, why it matters, and how patients can help to shape it.
Is health literacy more than reading ability?
Health literacy is often discussed in terms of reading age or the need to use plain language. In reality, it refers to a person’s ability to find, understand, evaluate, and use information to make informed decisions about their health.
This distinction matters because information can be technically accurate and still be difficult to interpret, apply, or act upon. A reader may understand every word in a leaflet and be left wondering “What should I do next?”, “How should I talk to my care team about this?”, or “How does this fit into my daily life?”.
The World Health Organization define health literacy as: “…the personal knowledge and competencies that enable people to access, understand, appraise, and use information and services in ways that promote and maintain good health and well-being for themselves and those around them.”
Designing for understanding, not just information transfer
People have access to more health information than ever before, but not necessarily information that is accurate, presented in a way that resonates with the reader, or content that offers clarity. So, how can the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry evolve communication to help address this gap?
Plain language is essential, but it is only the starting point. To support confidence, understanding, and meaningful participation in care, we need to consider more than the words on the page and instead move towards a tailored approach to patient engagement. This means considering the reader’s emotional state, previous experiences, cultural and accessibility needs, and the decisions or actions the information is intended to support.
Wherever possible, these considerations should be explored with the people the communication is intended to support. Meaningful involvement, through insight gathering, review, or co-creation, can help test assumptions and reveal whether information reflects people’s priorities and real-world experiences.
So, is the real challenge the complexity of the information we provide? Or how relevant the reader perceives it to be to their own experience?
As attention and ambition for patient engagement continue to grow, the Patient Engagement Interest Group aims to share practical considerations that prompt reflection on what authentic and appropriate communication looks like in practice, and how we can measure its impact.
In our next article, we explore why the idea of an “average patient” may be one of the biggest barriers to effective communication, and how we can better consider audience-specific needs.