When you’re on the receiving end: How reading like a patient changes everything

Patient-facing materials are often created in calm, controlled environments. Medical writers, translators, clinicians, and reviewers work through them with time, focus, and access to background knowledge.

But the people these materials are meant for rarely read them under the same conditions.

Patients often engage with information while stressed, distracted, medicated, overwhelmed, or in pain. They may be anxious about a diagnosis, preparing for a procedure, or trying to understand something that affects their daily life.

Their attention is limited, their worries are immediate, and they are searching for one sentence that helps them feel a little more in control.

The gap between how we produce these materials and how people actually read them is bigger than we tend to realise.

1. Patients don’t read sequentially. They read for reassurance.

We often picture a patient moving logically from top to bottom through a document. In reality, most people:

• Skim headings 

• Jump to whatever feels urgent 

• Skip background 

• Search for concrete expectations 

• Ignore anything that sounds generic

This is a normal cognitive response to stress, yet many patient materials are created as if the reader will absorb everything with full attention.

A text that survives real patient reading behaviour needs a strong hierarchy, unmissable headings, repetition of key points, and very clear next steps.

2. The “before” gets the detail. The “after” gets the silence.

Across procedures, treatments, and diagnostics, a predictable pattern appears. Pre-procedure information is usually the strongest. Post-procedure information is where the gaps appear. Patients are told:

• Where to go 

• When to arrive 

• What will be done 

• How long it takes

But once the intervention is over, the guidance often shifts to vague, open-ended statements: 

“Some discomfort is expected.”

“Rest as needed.”

“Contact your doctor if you have concerns.”

None of these answer the questions patients actually have:

• What does “some discomfort” usually mean? 

• How long is “normal”? 

• What sensations cause unnecessary anxiety? 

• What improves quickly and what takes longer? 

• What do most patients wish they had known sooner?

These missing pieces are communication blind spots that appear in every language pair, source text, and document type.

3. Jargon hides in tone and structure, not only in terminology

We are trained to spot complex terminology. But some of the most difficult “jargon” for patients is not technical at all. It is structural. For example: 

• Instructions without a timeframe 

• Risk statements written for regulators, not humans 

• Sentences that sound neutral to clinicians but cold or vague to patients 

• Explanations that rely on context that a worried reader does not have

These issues only become obvious when you read the text in the mindset of someone trying to plan their next 48 hours, not someone checking definitions and terminology consistency.

4. The real test for patient materials is not accuracy. It is usability.

Accuracy is essential. But usability determines whether the information is actually useful. A usable leaflet or post-op guide works when the reader: 

• Is tired and anxious

• Only absorbs fragments 

• Revisits it hours later looking for one detail

This is where good communication has the greatest impact. It bridges the gap between “correct” and “useful.”

Becoming the reader sharpens how we communicate

You do not need surgery or a chronic illness to experience this shift. It can happen when helping a family member, supporting a child, dealing with an unexpected injury, or even trying to interpret your own test results at the end of a long day.

The moment you are on the receiving end, you see assumptions and missing details with different eyes.

You notice how often we prioritise the workflow instead of the reader’s reality. And that awareness, even in small moments, makes us better at what we do.

Every time we work on patient-facing materials, we are shaping an experience for someone who is not thinking, feeling, or processing like we are at the moment we are writing or translating.

Patients do not read these materials with the calm focus of a specialist. They read them to cope and to make sense of something at a time when their attention and emotional bandwidth are limited. If we keep that version of the reader in mind, the tired one, the anxious one, the overwhelmed one, the quality of medical communication changes. And so does its impact.