Patient involvement in clinical trial design has evolved to provide opportunity for patients to be involved in medical publications. This evolution has allowed medical publications to gain invaluable patient perspectives on clinical research, by involving patients as authors in the development of plain language summaries and other, more traditional types of research publications¹.

The World Health Organisation defines health literacy as ‘the personal characteristics and social resources needed for individuals and communities to access, understand, appraise and use information and services to make decisions about health.’¹ Where levels of health literacy are high, people are able to play an active role in improving and maintaining their own health, engage successfully with community action for health, and push governments to meet their responsibilities in addressing health and health equity.²

On Wednesday 1^st September 2021, we launched the first-ever annual Patient Engagement Day – and what a day it was! Olivia Kersey, Patient Strategist, takes a look at some of the highlights.

Starting as a spontaneous brainwave from Emma Sutcliffe, our SVP, Patient Insights and Solutions, Patient Engagement Day 2021 involved a webinar with top industry thought leaders, video collaboration with three of our Patient Partners, a Twitter campaign, case study sharing, and the development of a toolkit to help other organisations to get involved. And that was just for the launch!

Plain language summaries, or PLS, are a concept that has indelibly changed our world of medical publications, likely forever. And yet, we still seem a world away from having PLS integrated fully and consistently into publications practices. In fact, it has taken several years of head-scratching to even align on a definition for PLS for publications, versus patient lay summaries of clinical trials, layperson summaries, and so on.

The WHO Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030 is a key document that outlines the changes and aspirations that the WHO has for the next decade around protection and wellbeing of patients. The plan, produced on 3 August 2021, aims to educate various stakeholders (NHS, HCPs, pharma and patient groups) about current issues surrounding patient safety and outline their proposed solutions¹. The main goal over the next 10 years is a ‘zero harm philosophy’¹. This means that although it’s impossible to totally wipe out errors in patient safety, the goal is to work towards being as close to zero harm as possible. But why are we telling you about it now? Because it’s World Patient Safety Day!