Patient education materials

A patient education material is the standing piece that helps a patient understand a condition, a procedure, a treatment or how to care for themselves: the leaflet or fact sheet a health service hands out, or the education a pharmaceutical sponsor commissions across a product's life. The parts divide by what has to be settled about the material: what it is for and what it may say, how a sponsor's programme is planned, how one piece is written so that it is understood and gets its reader to engage and act, and how an organisation keeps a whole set of it. The documents a trial participant reads about one study are left to the documents for trial participants, the aid a patient uses to weigh a treatment choice to patient decision aids, and the language and layout principles every material for a lay reader follows to plain language and readable layout.

• What patient education achieves — the aims patient education serves, how the understanding and satisfaction it builds give patients an active part in their care, and what it does for patients' adherence and for the health systems that serve them
• What patient material may say — the laws, codes and guidelines that apply from a clinical trial to an over-the-counter product, the do's and don'ts in a trial and for a marketed product, and how far material that explains may also persuade
• Planning patient education for a pharmaceutical sponsor — the constraints of the industry setting, the patient's journey from disease awareness to support for a chronic condition, patient insights, objectives agreed with the sponsor, format and channel, and the client's review
• Writing a material patients understand first time — accessibility, one message placed where a reader who only glances finds it, need-to-know content, order, words and sentences, layout, tone, review by patients and caregivers, and a six-point checklist for a leaflet
• Getting the reader to engage, ask and act — interactive devices on the page, permission to ask the doctor questions, questions that teach rather than test, and scripts for medical and interpersonal situations
• Running patient education across an organisation — the templates, clinical approval and distribution that make a health system's fact sheets consistent and findable, a hospital's literacy review and tailored leaflets, the case for investment, getting plain words accepted inside the institution, and reaching readers through lay health workers in their own community