Patient and public communication

A reader chooses here by the reader outside the professions the work addresses or involves: patients and trial participants, the public as a general reader, through journalism, the web and a writer's own essays and poems, public health communication under distrust and misinformation, and patients as partners in the work. It leaves plain language, health literacy and testing with readers to writing for the reader, the regulatory obligations behind a trial's lay documents to regulatory writing, promotion and education for professionals to medical communications and education, patients named as authors to authorship, and carrying patient materials into another language to medical translation.

• Documents for patients and trial participants — documents for patients in care, with education materials and decision aids, and for trial participants, from the recruitment advertisement and consent to the lay summary of results
• Writing for the public — health journalism and features, web, social media and outreach, creative and reflective writing, and science writing for children and young adults
• Trust, hesitancy and misinformation — why misinformation outruns the facts, keeping public trust in public health and regulatory communication, writing where industry is distrusted, content that corrects, the vaccine-hesitant reader, speaking up, and running a channel or fact-checking team
• Patient partnerships in research and communication — why patients are partners, who the advocates are, organising involvement, working with an advocate on a document, publication steering committees, children and young people, the device industry, what patients organise online, and what involvement has changed